Trade off
Synergy. That ubiquitous word we find mentioned in every merger, alliance, partnership or business acquistion. That most elusive of things to actually realize business value from. Ok so, the most common synergy resides in cost efficiencies that are achieved through combining shared activities of two firms. It is THE easiest synergy to realize, if there was ever a low hanging fruit among synergies, this is it. Now, in order to achieve these cost efficiencies some people will lose there jobs, well someone will have to fire them. We slickly call it ‘active management of overhead’ or ‘SG&A trimming’ from a financial perspective or ‘right sizing’ in the realm of corporate strategy. Whatever it maybe, we state is so simply, in our case reports – an easy win, an obvious move. But it changes the life of people who are affected.I saw some one get fired the past week. I was a bit saddened by how quickly it happened, how quickly people forgot and moved on. The business student in me understands the logic behind it and does admire the ruthless effectiveness of the human machinery that kept on working inspite of this key ex-employee’s absence, but the person in me dislikes the way in which the termination was carried out. I felt like saying “show some respect” to those who oversaw the job termination.
Somethings must be done, like reducing staff but there is a civil respectful way of doing it and this way sometimes is not consistent with Effectiveness and Efficiency tenets and a trade off must made.
Decision Time
There are more than many analytical & heuristic models to resolve conflict between mutually exclusive alternatives, and i know some if not all of them. But when it comes to making a decision about the internship that i must undertake, these decision making techniques fail me. As i stated earlier now is the time to decide between two internship offers that i have.
I was dumbfounded on how to make up my mind. I weighed whether i go for the function i want to perform or the domain\industry i want to work in, i weighed the long term implications of being in these vastly different careers if these internships turn into full time jobs, i weighed the probability of my internship turning into a full time position, i weighed the future prospects of these companies, i weighed the full-time 6 figure salary in one to the leisure and work-life balance of the other and i finally weighed the future prospects of the industries in general that i will be part off by taking these internships and i weighed all of these again and still no answer.
I talked to my parents, as it was as if a curtain was lifted off my mind and I used the simplest decision making tool known to man. I listened to my heart and simply decided to take my first steps into working for a top 5 technology consulting firm.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
This intrigued me… I first heard about SEO about couple of years ago from one of my friends who was talking about this new idea of “human powered” search engines like Mahalo and the basic contrast with existing “crawler” search engines like Google. He was explaining to me how crawlers work and how SEO process tries to adapt\mold the website to make the content inside the website look juicy to the search engine. If you think about it, SEO is quite beautiful it has a single clear goal with a limited number of broad alternatives to achieve that goal, but each alternative is quite deep.
We now have firms that will provide this SEO service to websites, in business sense one can think of this as a add-on or adjunct to the marketing function. They(the SEO optimization experts) would aim to ensure that the website would show up in the first few entries in the search engine so that people will follow the links and incoming traffic to your website increases, thereby increasing your reach to the target customer i.e. you and me. SEO is a marriage of technology and marketing. When we talk about SEO we can think of the content on you website as the product, the crawler your customer, who, if it likes your website will be kind enough to rank your website highly so that it can list higher on the search results and then the other things will follow.
SEO is a growing niche expertise. As the magnitude of information on the web increases with the easy access to this information controlled by search engines and access been everything SEO industry is bound to prosperous for the foreseeable future
PS : I had my first marketing class yesterday. I am an operations guy and marketing does not catch my fancy. But strangely I liked the first lecture on marketing nonetheless I loved the operations lecture that followed 
Wiki Vs Knol
It made me a bit sad when i heard about Google’s big announcement about “Knol“, which some said could be thought of as a competitor for Wiki. Why was I sad? I was sad, because i have come to love and admire everything Google has brought into the web, but there is a special place in my heart for Wiki.
When Google enters an arena, it overwhelms it’s competition by the sheer brilliance of the product\service that it offers. So if it was a fight of technical competencies between Google and Wiki. It would be no match… Google would trample Wiki. But, in reality “Knol” is not “Wiki”.
There is the obvious architectural difference between Knol & Wiki with the latter being author less collaboration with no individual owner for a article, while the former lacks both. It is not that Knol is bad because it lacks these characteristics, just that it is a different product and so not a direct competitor of Wiki.One more difference between Wiki and Knol will be advertisements. In Wiki, there is no provision for advertisement, while Knols will provide for advertisement to generate revenue.
Only future will tell how successful Knols will become, but i consider Wiki to be more that a just a piece of technology, it is the clay that has molded wikipedia and other thousands of non-profit initiatives, it has brought knowledge at our finger tips and moved far beyond the search engines that have provided us with heaps of information and mountains of data. Knol may be a huge commercial success in the near future, but it will never match Wiki in my mind and soul.
