Leadership is 99% inspiration and 1% perspiration

There, I said it. With due apologies to Thomas Edison for taking the liberty to mangle his most famous and oft quoted insight into the makings of a genius. Mr. Edison's comments were really attuned to the individual, or genius, to be appropriate. The comment about leadership is really about how the leader should treat his followers. History is littered with examples where leaders have been able to achieve really big things by inspiring their followers. Amongst social and political legends, Mahatama Gandhi, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy are a few who immediately come to mind. But this advice is totally relevant to business leaders faced with motivating their employees to perform at their full potential. For knowledge economy companies, a spark of inspiration ignited by a skillful leader within employees can produce outsized results. On the other hand, forcing employees to perform under the rule of stick hardly leads to above par perfomance on a sustained basis.

What are the good ways to inspire employees is a topic for another post.

Secrets of her success - Indira Nooyi

Living wisely, agreeably, and well - that is how Indira Nooyi describes her state of life. At the age of 52 she is leading an iconic American corporation and has already produced impressive results within 19 months of taking over the top spot at Pepsi. The June issue of Costo Connection has a nice profile on her.

She appears to be a firm believer in CSR (corporate social responsibility). At the very least, she understands what role CSR could play in leading her company to new levels of success in today's social climate and globally linked economy. She has even crafted a new rallying matra for her troops over at Pepsi - "Performance with Purpose". I think this is going to resonate very well with the emerging economy populace where her company has major ambitions for expansion. The philosophy of "doing well by doing good" is becoming mainstream by the day within corporate echelons and I thank Indira for being a high profile proponent. Looking at her roots and early years, it is not surprising to see why she thinks this way.

Indira lays out five C's of success in the article: competence, courage/ confidence, communication, compass, and coaching. I think competence and communication are simply enablers for success. The real difference in most people's path to success is made by the level of courage they display and the posse of values and beliefs that guides their action (compass). The fifth attribute - coaching - is too weak and won't make my list.

Importance of competitive search market

Michael Arrington has an excellent post on Techcrunch on the often asked question - "Is the search war over?"

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/25/the-importance-of-a-competitive-search-market/

I think innovation in search is far from over. We are just beginning to see some good ideas being implemented in semantic search, social search, deep web, and search results visualization areas. The gap in quality of organic results is not that wide between Google and Yahoo offerings. However, Google’s brand and its monetization of queries is way ahead of the competitors. But despite its best efforts to date, Google has not been able to tranform its leadership in PC Internet search over to mobile internet search, which has different dynamics. Yahoo and MS will do best to keep the pace of innovation high to neutralize Google’s lead in PC search while trying to establish themselves as legit alternatives in mobile space. You only have to look at what’s happening in mobile advanced worlds such as Korea and JP to understand how Yahoo and MS can use mobile disruption to get back in search game.

I think MS has done a good job with Live Search Cash Back scheme. It is a classic case of trying to dislodge a leader by redefining the rules of the game. Google has a lock on CPC based search advertising and is seemingly very hard to dislodge. By offering CPA model alongwith cash back lure for consumers, I believe MS will be able to gain good traction with advertisers as well as consumers. Rolling this out to mass market adsense segment will be even better. I bet they are already working on that.

Starting Up

The pace of innovation in internet software space is outright crazy. There is so much stimuli one gets everyday reading a variety of news articles and blogs. This blog is to capture my thoughts on some of the latest and most promising trends that I come across. I don't know what the frequency of my posts will be, but I will strive towards posting at least once a week.

While the world is moving over to microblogging (thanks to twitter), I thought it is a good time to at least try out creating a blog.