Quodlibet

There is a seven floored Shobha on the way to my wife's office. The apartments are ready to occupy and there are very few occupants. It has been this way from at least a year.   I have been seeing at least 5 to-let boards on completed/old commercial complexes from the last six months in the vicinity of my house. Close to 50% of the new stores, shops that had come up in the last 6 months have closed. Sweet vendors, cloth stores, stationary shop etc. One of them told me that the business was not good and he could not afford the rent. The Business in general has not been good. But how then, have the real-estate prices been holding up? Black money. Most of real-estate business runs on black money, the kind of money that did not expect returns anyway. It (black money) was parked under beds and pillow covers it is now standing as a building. And the real-estate Mafia, it appears to me, is holding the real-estate prices, artificially. The impression that most of us get when go our...

As a business analyst you may be required to compare growths of different entities over several periods. Conventionally, one would think of percentage growth or CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate) to compare growth rates. These are also the metrics your management is mostly familiar with. However, in many cases these metrics may not do a good job. Let us say you are in B2B industry and your boss asks you to identify the fastest growing customer in the last 6 months (or 6 years). At the outset, this question seems simple and straightforward. As you start working on this, you will  realize that this is not straight forward. This is very different from comparing your portfolio returns using CAGR or finding the fastest growing country. You cannot simply measure the percentage growth between the first month and the sixth month and use that for comparisons. The reason being, each of your partner could be from a different...

“Employees are our assets” almost every CEO has perhaps used it at least once in his lifetime. However, adding these assets under these uncertain economic conditions has become somewhat difficult. Companies, big and small alike, often do not have a steady influx of projects. You may have projects to engage 600 people in one part of the year in other parts of the year you may not have enough work for 200 people. In such cases it is impossible to maintain a workforce of 600 throughout the year. This problem has given rise to new breed of manpower sourcing agencies. We often refer to them as body shoppers. These firms provide temporary workforce to those companies in need. Some larger companies also utilize their bench by lending their workforce to other companies on a temporary basis.  From the example above, the company would employ 200 people and hire contractors when their workforce need gets escalated. Body shoppers employ contractors and supply them on a need basis. R...

Employees from across industries and domains frown when their managers ask them for a report. Reporting, in the eyes of many, is not a productive activity. Nonetheless, every organization maintains a fleet of reporting / MIS analyst, Business analysts, BI tools etc.  For most companies the reporting and analytics fleet will remain an overhead unless the core business of the company is analytics, BI or reporting. Despite its auxiliary nature, reports are very powerful. They help those at the helm to call the shots which can make or break the future of a company, and those associated with it. People providing reports are always the first to see information, like a sailor atop the mast. The reporting team will have the results of a company even before the CFO sees it. In many companies, members of the reporting team are prohibited from trading in shares. And the power of these reports puts its creators in a very responsible spot. Like my Manager rightly reminded me, a wrong repor...

Norman Pritchard won two silver medals for India in the 1900 Paris Olympics. And after that it was not until 1952, when  Khashaba Dadasaheb Jadhav  won a bronze in wrestling, India's medal tally rose above one. Besides these two medals India did not manage to win any other events other than in hockey until 1996. At this point in time, for someone judging Indian sports from a 100 year Olympic history, Hockey was a natural choice for a national sport . Because, it seemed, a nation of one billion played nothing but Hokey. But after 1996 India won medals in Tennis, Weightlifting, Shooting, Etc. This year India doubled its previous medal count, a total of 6 medals. This is the best medal count for India in  all of its Olympic history. Despite the increase in medal count India still remains the last in the list of per-capita medals . You can witness this yourself from the chart titled PerCapita Medal History. The Scroll ...

Ignorantia juris non excusat  If discussing law on your blog was illegal, and you told the judge that you did not know about it you'll probably get a earfuls starting with "Ignorantia juris non excusat.....".  How many of us knew this was Latin? (Latin is now a dead language) How many of us know what it means?   It means, ignorance of law is not an excuse. This doctrine assumes that the law is sufficiently published and distributed. (Ironically, it does not talk about comprehension).  Let us try to assess how well our (Indian) law is publicized. Are we taught law, or its basics in school? No focus is on getting us to remember Dr. Ambedkar's Birth date, his caste, his conversion, his dad, his mom, everything but his work. Yes, we have online documents availeble. In English and Hindi Our law is primarily in English,  and only 10-15% Indians can read and comprehend  English. And the kind of English that leg...

When I was planning on buying a car. I thought I'll buy a used car. Although I was fully aware of  George Akerlof 's  theory  about second hand car market, I decided to take a shot at it.  Because the "reasonable man" , that we so often read about in economics, often has reasons beyond  economics. Reasons like : Leaving the country; don't know what to do with the car;  Bought a new car there is no place to park my old car;  This car is jinxed!   So I downloaded data from  Cardheko  and few other sites and started my cherry hunt. I was convinced that I could use analytics to pick my cherry. Penny (to the Blogger): "Honey, I know you think you are explaining yourselves but you are not." Ok, George Akeflof's Nobel winning theory suggest that there will be no good cars in a used car market because they don't fetch a fair price.  And he refers to good cars as a Cher...