Early this month I travelled to Agra to walk barefoot around the Taj Mahal, the only wonder of the world that stands in honour of a woman. Make no mistake. That mausoleum was built three and a half centuries ago in memory of a very powerful woman. She was a confidante and counsellor to Shah…
“In India, I See a Lot More Acceptance of Gender in the Workplace” DuPont Chair & CEO ELLEN KULLMAN in conversation with CHAITANYA KALBAG. Edited excerpts: Do you think the India-US CEO Forum you are a member of has managed to get things moving a bit in terms of a more positive attitude towards bilateral…
Jeff Immelt stepped into Jack Welch’s shoes four days before 9/11. Even more than the legendary Welch, he has GE blood in his veins – his father worked for the company and he met his wife at the company. The 28-year-old GE veteran stands six feet four and has a firm grip, as befits an…
Early this month I travelled to Agra to walk barefoot around the Taj Mahal, the only wonder of the world that stands in honour of a woman. Make no mistake. That mausoleum was built three and a half centuries ago in memory of a very powerful woman. She was a confidante and counsellor to Shah…
Just as we were putting this special issue of Business Today to bed. Thomas M. Hoenig. President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, wrote a provocative essay titled Too Big to Succeed in The New York Times, noting that America’s five largest financial institutions are 20 per cent bigger than they were before…
And now at the end he found himself in his own house, on his own half-lot of land, his own portion of the earth. That he should have been responsible for this seemed to him…stupendous.” …
Have you heard the story about Warren Buffett, the 215 millionaires, and the coin-flipping orangutans? It takes some telling and you will have to buy a biography of the Sage of Omaha to read it. The point the world’s canniest investor made (in 1984) was that markets are not efficient, stocks are not all priced…
H for Hitler. A for arrogant, R for rascal, I for idiot …” I’m sure many of us remember the “Hari Sadu” commercial about the cheeky young man getting back at his nasty boss because he’s already heard from job site naukri.com. It was acid, funny, and emblematic of the “me do” generation that is…
Sexual harassment can be crude and overt or very subtle, but you know you are being sexually harassed when you experience it. Those around you may even be oblivious to it, especially if the dominant work culture is male. Harassment is upsetting, threatening, and insidious. It can be obliquely transmitted through glance or gesture or…
Nothing matches the rush of blood to the brain when you read super-sized success stories. Nothing tells the story of the Milky Way of densely-packed stars across India’s business sky as vividly as our annual BT500 rankings. Year after year, from the first listing in Business Today’s March 7-22 1992 issue, the rankings have chronicled…
Remember when mall meant a tree-shaded promenade in Shimla or one of those picturesque cantonment towns, and plastic was when your grandmother graduated from tin buckets in the bath- room? Now the Oxford dictionary lists “malling: the action of passing time at a shopping mall”, and tykes, tots, teens and tweens wash through our malls…
You won’t get the lounges with pile carpeting, deep sofas, canapés and laptop docks. You don’t have the noise and to-do of Mamatadi’s Duronto non-stop trains either. What you do get is efficient ground staff checking you in at the airport; much better on-time performance than the larger carriers, smart and purposeful crew members; crisp…
India is a land of plenty. It is also a land of plenty of waste. If you suffer Malthusian nightmares of the Great Unfed Billions, think of the food we produce that we don’t even consume. We could be buried by an avalanche of fruit (15 per cent of global output) and vegetables (11 per…
I had my epiphany on a Seoul subway in 2004. All around me, young men and women rode to work silently, mesmerised by television programmes streaming live into their handsets. Digital Multimedia Broadcasting was just starting off, but South Korea was already one of the most wired nations on earth — more than 70 per…
A professional suitable match for a beautiful, slim MBA Punjabi girl… Boy to be MBA, Engineer, CA.” Not too long ago, in the matrimonial ads crowding our weekend newspapers, brides or grooms looking for a mate proudly proclaimed that they were “BA Pass”, the key to a happy life. No longer, though. India produces millions…
Edited excerpts of a conversation BT’s Chaitanya Kalbag and Josey Puliyenthuruthel had with GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt On the US economy Things are getting better in the United States. It’s a slow recovery, and some of that is based on how steep the crisis was, on consumer deleveraging, and the savings rate going…
Chaitanya Kalbag Barack Obama had barely walked out of Parliament’s Central Hall when the debate began on whether his India visit was “transactional” or “strategic”. It was neither. Obama, accompanied by an unusually large contingent of CEOs, many of them small and medium businessmen, was in search of jobs. Yes, the $10 billion of purchasing…
“In India, I See a Lot More Acceptance of Gender in the Workplace” Do you think the India-US CEO Forum you are a member of has managed to get things moving a bit in terms of a more positive attitude towards bilateral trade? It is very important to get things on the table to understand…
Nitish Kumar’s victory in last month’s Bihar election celebrates the triumph of economics over feudalism, but the climb out of poverty will be steep and hard. Schoolgirls on bicycles. Schools that actually function. Half of all panchayat posts are reserved for women. Close to 40,000 criminals were put behind bars. Roads that can be driven…