What should governments be involved in other than governance ?

For this post - am not writing a new set. This is a cross post from Sikshana.blogspot.com

There is growing concern about PPP model in the secondary education (proposed).
Please see this posting :

http://sikshana.blogspot.com/2009/10/ppp-in-secondary-education_11.html#links

My comments on the post being
_____________________________________________________________
Dear ESR,
Long ago (while I was still fresh out of Ayn Rand readings), I was asked what should the government be responsible for. This was for a debate. I still remember that after much thought I had come down to the crux of governance and social equality that would be covered by
a. Defense
b. Law & Order
c. Healthcare
d. Education till 10th

Over time, having seen the power of government sanctions (where LAND and Industry allocations / grants are made) and having read the farce of boards eg. WAKF etc, I've come to add another item to this list and that is "livelihood". My guess is that the NREGS is possibly a close example.

Why the background - IMHO the government has NO business running the road business ?

Your concern on secondary education is very valid and is something that we need to discourage actively !

We, as a nation, are only growing to address the growing rural-urban divide by taking schools / hospitals and livelihood to the rural areas and NOT by allocating "x" % of seats in urban schools to the BPL section ?

Let us see how we can bring this under the bigger "urban-rural" divide discussion as that may have better traction / purchase ?

Time off on Gandhi Jayanthi : Is it the right thing to do ?

I'm sure people all around have been exposed to this "timely" debate. I saw a twitter like snippet off Shashi Tharoor and a longer debate over the news hour.

I'm surprised at the level of hypocrisy in the debate .vs. actual demonstration of thought.


I heard Tushar Gandhi ask for social work to be given time off while picnic/ timeoff be marked as absent. I'd like to ask him a question :What would his inaugural attendance of the Mont Blanc pen "Gandhi special" be termed as ? Would that qualify as social work ?

For the un-initiated : there are 2 "luxury" brands who've released Mahatma Gandhi specials - one is LLADRO with their figurine. See picture below


and the other is the Pen from Mont Blanc - see picture below (Mr Tushar Gandhi releasing it)



Again for those who've not been watching the news. The Lladro figurine costs USD 700 while the limited edition pen costs USD 25000 ! (yes, that is right, there are 3 zeros at the end and it is in USD)

What a change from the edict of simple living and high thinking ?

Atleast, people like us (the Aam Janatha) do not preach on simple living as we do enjoy the occasional high living. I wish I could state the same for the thinking side too ;-) when I generalize ?

I: Post partition blues - Are we going to re-write history ?

First, I guess, my prediction on the new "hot" topic went down - damp squib....
It seems to have been overtaken by the BJP issue of the version on national identity, which made me think - what is the identity that we are talking about ?

Historically, I'm told that Md Ali Jinnah took the name "Pakistan" only because he thought Pt Nehru would choose "Bharat" as the name and not "India" ?

India - the name itself (I'm told) comes from variously, Sindhu (river) / Hindu (and therefore Indus). Interestingly, "India" finds no mention in any of Indian script / history and it has always been "Bharata varsha". The Indus meanwhile is out in current Pakistan. So much so, the Aryan heritage post the Mohenjadaro / Harappan settlements are also in current Pakistan ?

Time to think back to the only Emperor who was truly Indian - Ashoka or should I say "Devanampiya" ?

I'm sure that there are tons of "Dravidian" thinkers who'd state that even Ashoka has a "Aryan" heritage that could be foreign ? But, we need to stop at some point and stop re-inventing the history.

IMHO - Ashoka's "DHAMMA" is probably the closest we have to a truly secular, value based community and adoption should get closest to the proverbial "Rama Rajya" ?

The newsweek article : USA :Everyone is a Hindu now

I'm sure this one article is going to create a buzz - atleast in India !
The only reason it probably has not already created a buzz is that no-one in India today has time for anything in the papers except for H1N1 :-)


http://www.newsweek.com/id/212155 is something I'd like you to click on. This actually captures the spirit of Indian hinduism - very benign, follow what you may attitude to religion

I remember talking to people in the midwest of US (YES - in LDS land)
One of them commented about my whiteshirt stating that it reminds them of their preachers. I replied stating that in a way we have a lot more in common !.

Hindus have always believed in re-birth, in the concept that god speaks through humans, in the concept that every living / non-living thing in the world is a manifestation of god and also to NOT believe in all of the above is ALSO a hindu belief !

Let us see how the article gets accepted by the world - that will be a true reflection of the belief ?

Is a long life essential for developing an intelligent being ?

I was reading some material on sea creatures during the weekend and one of the things that struck me was that apparently Octopus is considered a very "intelligent" animal.
This, I found easy to relate to given the size of it's head / brain as a % of body mass. What surprised me was that for me- this was news.

I had heard how the "other" animals in the list eg. Dolphin, Whales etc were smart, but, for some reason Octopii were not in the same classification ? These were generally clumped under the squids etc and seen as best on french cuisine / calamari !

That got me thinking.....

Given that the normal life-span of an Octopus is only 3 years (yes, it is true), maybe, they never get enough time to make it to the intelligent list ? After all, human kids of that age have still had not "learnt" a lot of things ?

So, maybe, if we extended the life-span of a Octopus, we could teach it to sing & dance ?
Hmmm.....

Is "affordable housing" the new fad or the genuine article ?

Last week I was in UAE and contrasting their residential building market (esp. Dubai) now and a few months / quarters ago. Today, as against a building frenzy a year ago, the market seems downright down in the dumps. The talk of the town however, continues to be how "upscale" properties are now available at 60% of the earlier rate rather than how "affordable" housing has been !

Seeing the numerous ads in the local newspapers made me wonder if there is commercial merit ?

Let us face it, in terms of building affordable housing, the key cost factors of land, material and labour have NOT changed significantly except for land. Given that most of these builders probably have a land bank already and are not making "cash" payments today, what really has changed ?

Is it just that they are going to be using "cheaper" materials and giving up on higher margins ?

Dont' you think that there is some "herd" mentality going on esp. given that default and cost of money has probably gone up ?

If the builders were really looking at "affordable" housing, then, IMHO there should be a grounds up review of the market. Today, the housing market is mixed with 1/2 and 3 bedroom apartments that do not actually leverage the target model.

In my view, if a builder actually did a grounds up building to cater to "similar" target market and then worked on efficiency, there would be better throughput. As an example, I'm sure there is a market for bachelor "pads" with ample two-wheeler parking PLUS utility for single occupants. These utilities would range from food outlets to possible a video rental to a dhobi/laundry.

The ground floor would then generate enough "maintenance" funds and let the occupants in the higher floors (all single occupancy) to work out an efficient cost model ? Dont' you think ?

I'm sure we can think of similar setup for various target users ?

Google Sqared : Getting search to be multi-dimensional

I'm not sure if people have watched the announcement or realized the value / potential of Google's new release of search - Google squared. I was pleasantly surprised to see that this now has a few features that I've always wanted and had some individuals do a bit of development on the side to evaluate the APIs.

Here is a quick recap of the press release "Google Squared does not provide a list of links to Web pages, like with a traditional Google search, but presents information derived from a query in a spreadsheet-like grid called a "square." Users of google.com/squared can then build, modify and refine their "square" through further Web searches. Unlike a normal search engine

, Google Squared doesn't find webpages about your topic -- instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet"

The press release may sound confusing, however, here is an example that I ran. I did a google square on the word "coke" - which threw up a series of results in a grid - ie. rows + columns.

I then tweaked what I wanted to see in rows and what I wanted to see in columns.
Next, I added "Pepsi" to the sqare to generate a new set.

The kinds of things I added was "Started from" which told me when a particular product like Coke Cherry was launched. This still has a way to go - simply because you'll see that the "Sales" did not return anything significant.


Now - I'm sure someone is going to ask me about Microsoft Bing - Have I used it ?
NO, and I'll wait till the buzz dies down atleast .....

The 10K Marathon in Bangalore :Great participation

I've been off my blog for a couple of weeks - I guess it is the writer's block !.
Not that there has been a shortage of topics to comment upon - we've had the new government and Congress's landslide (of sorts) victory. Then, there has been the racial outrage in Australia not to mention the earlier SriLankan victory over the TTs......

More importantly, I guess, there was a certain level of weariness that had set in and I needed something that'd help me get over my writers' block. That boost came in yesterday with the Sunfeast 10 K run. The surprise at the participation as indeed pleasant.

It was wonderful to see so many people participating in the various "run" categories - I was running with my daughters and was in the Majaa run. We actually joined up the 10 K open category at it's finishing stage and then did the Majaa run.

There certainly was a lot of colour and gaiety. I understand the organizers lost count at the 23000 mark on participation and I was also witness to dozens of "un-registered" runners, in the race just for the fun of participation.

I saw whole groups of people - from NGOs, from Corporates, batchmates from a college etc, chatting and in a jovial mood that the run itself seemed a very pleasant and relaxed event. The camaraderie was certainly visible in all their faces.

The countdown on Indian Elections : high volume data processing

Starting very early tomorrow (May 16), India prepares to count the electoral votes post the elections. I'm sure enough has been said about the world's largest elections - however, am not sure if people have spared a thought on the sheer amount of data processing that is going to be used.

First is the result computation. The entire vote bank split on an average of 11 different ways (I'm told that the average number of candidates inclusive of the independents is 11)

Then, the psepologists that will get onto the TV and media. We are talking about 5-6 major media groups and about 50-60 regional groups, all slicing and dicing the numbers !

While elections probably started the computing revolution with the early counting machines, I think for sheer volume, this election is probably a record !

Tech Mahindra + Satyam : A tale of two...

As most people (atleast the IT folks in India) would know by now, Tech Mahindra has won the bid for Satyam. While, the current debate on valuation is expected to continue for a while, I thought, I'd just pen my own SWOT from a Tech Mahindra perspective.

Given that I own a few shares of Tech Mahindra (although NEVER did for Satyam), this may be seen as the "informed" view of an industry outsider ?

Strengths (read Advantages)
- TM has traditionally been in the telecom vertical and is perceived as a "vertical industry" player. This has meant that for a while, TM has been missing out on the broad "general business" areas of Retail, distribution, manufacturing, services etc. This would add considerable breadth
- Satyam supposedly has a fairly strong "fixed price" model (profitability unknown :-)) that should be good for TM
- Satyam's reach in both the middle east and AUS / NZ markets

Weakness (read Disadvantage)
- Management /Thought leadership : Especially in the areas of Packaged applications (SAP, Oracle, MS Dynamics), Custom development (non-product) and managed services
- Culture : Not sure how they'd be able to reconcile the bottom load model of Satyam at cheaper rates to the vertical strength model that TM has
- Parity : This just has to do with employee status and relationship management ?

Opportunity
- The biggest opportunity for TM would be the opening of the horizontal "multinational" enterprise - ranging from Travel industry to retail to pharma/healthcare
- The opening of the COTS (read as ERP/ CRM) market

Threat
- Client / customer and account retention (and this one needs no elaboration)
- Cost advantage ? (esp. given that most of the contracts that Satyam needs to deliver on would be on a very aggressive P&L) and the market perception / environment

However, what is very clear is that this is probably the start of a clear sign of consolidation.

Electricity conservation : Smart Metering with Smart pricing ?

Today, I saw another article on smart metering in ET's online edition that prompts me to write out this post.

For most people in Bangalore, power cuts are a routine thing. Infact, a telling and poignant photo in the local newspapers a couple of weeks ago had school children protesting that the power cuts were impacting their studies / exam results !

On their part, the government is trying to "buy" power from neighboring states to make up the deficit. This, when, the power dept is running under deficit and is owed millions by other government departments themselves ! Anyway, that is a digression.

Coming to governance, I think the best way to regulate power usage is to come up with a time based power tariff. Reasoning is simple, we Indians love to save money and if it means we have to switch on our "boilers" / "storage water heaters" in the middle of the night - we will. There just has to be an incentive.

Some of you may remember that the explosion of telecom (not the current mobile one, but, the earlier STD / landline one) owed a lot to the then prevalent incentive ie. ALL calls made between 10 PM in the night to 6 AM in the morning would be at 50% discount.

I still remember the long queue that would develop at some phone booths 15 mins or sometimes even 30 mins before the 10 PM deadline.

We would still need to upgrade our meters by making it time aware. All I'm stating is that it is NOT necessary to make the meters internet / online, but, it is sufficient for us to be able to get the meter to count at different rates based on time. Maybe we can pass that information on the grid itself so that the meters reconfigure on their own based on demand ?

Another idea to work on in my free time (when it happens!)

The much talked about Spirit of Mumbai or Why do I like Mumbai ?

For a lot of parents who worry about their child going out of town for their job, my suggestion of " let the individual start their career with a job in Mumbai - it is the best thing that that can happen" raises a lot of eyebrows. There is however a reason for this. Infact, I was reminded of all these reasons encapsulated as the spirit of Mumbai last week when I was talking to a colleague that has prompted this post.

The first thing that Mumbai teaches is "value of money". Purists will argue that we should focus on the word "value", we should replace the word "of" with "for" etc. but, Mumbai actually, I believe teaches one the value "of" money.

This is clearly demonstrated by the concept of "Shared autos and Shared cabs". Brilliant !!
It is a pleasure to walk up to any of the shared cab areas outside a train station to get into a shared cab where you get to talk to and interact with strangers. The best thing in the model is that it is a perfect example of "win-win" positioning. The individual rider wins by having to pay less, the cab driver wins by collecting slightly more than a straight "share".

Then, there is the Equality of money that the local 1st class bogie teaches. I'm actually NOT being demeaning by marking the term 1st class !!!. While I do recognize that there is a daily struggle and the bulk of the people move in the local's second class bogies, there is something magical about the 1st class bogie and that is "Aspirations"

If you sit in one of these morning / evening commuter bogies, you will get to see people from all classes of the "working hierarchy" rub shoulders. There will be the senior managers in a public sector / a bank to the rank newbie (still wet / green behind the ears) working as a trainee in an MNC. ALL of them are very open and discuss their career aspirations and hopes candidly using the co-commuter as a bouncing board. It is simply amazing !

After you spend a few months in Mumbai, you get to appreciate the term "Jugaad". In Mumbai, people learn the "yes" attitude and it grows on you. While the same attitude almost borders on "chalta hai" in other northern cities, I believe Mumbai has always had a "Can Do" set that is quite distinctive.

These 3 examples / attitudes of Jugaad, Save while you can and hold high aspirations make Mumbai an unique experience.

Let me repeat, if you ever get a chance to spend a few months working in Mumbai - irrespective of all the other troubles / issues - please do grab it !

Emirates Terminal 3 in Dubai - being in the belly of a snake ?

Most of my transits in Dubai terminal 3 ever since it opened have been in the night where I've not had a chance to see it in its' full glory until this trip.

This time, I had a distinct feeling that I was getting into the belly of a giant desert SNAKE !

You see, the design (see above) has the distinct pattern of a desert Snake. Once you walk in, you need to traverse for a looong loonng time across the belly of this snake to get to immigration.

The planes on either side almost seem to be the equivalents of small ants / insects coming in to take a dig at this dead snake !

I think in this case, there was an attempt to force fit into the design as I see a clear issue with the loading of passenger traffic. All focus is on the center or this belly where the lounges + the shopping area is. This means the extremes of this snake has a LOT of free space with a vauge emptiness to it, while the middle is the swollen "hippo for breakfast" in this snake.

Satyam Fiasco : Meeting market expectations

Did not want to jump in and comment with all the noise. However, there seems to be a MAJOR point missing in all that I've read - MARKET EXPECTATIONS

If one reads Raju's letter carefully, there seems to be an invisible struggle within the "Mea Culpa" tone that is saying - I did what was expected of me by the market ? Is this true ?

I've sat through a number of earnings calls / shareholders meetings (Disclosure : I own shares in quite a few IT companies - but, never had SATYAM) where the analysts are always asking just a common set of questions. These being
- What has been your revenue growth and what will be your revenue growth ?
- What has been your margin % and growth ?

These questions themselves are fine - however, the expectation of benchmark is that revenue will grow at almost 100% Y-O-Y and margin will always be upwards of 40% !!

These are not sustainable in the long run and are unrealistic benchmarks.

As long as the expectations of analysts and market watchers are not "reasonable" expect the response to it to be correspondingly "un-reasonable"

The market has to realize that 30% revenue growth, 15-30 % margins are all "GOOD" and "REASONABLE" in a growth market and these are sustainable values that show good governance.

Is it the expectation / is it mandatory to have 40% + margins to tell the market that you have a well run company ?

Managing managers : The art of whitewash ?

A couple of evenings ago, during dinner with a visitor from the US - someone I know very well, the issue of outsourcing to India and the problems experienced came up as a natural point of debate.

Background
- A major networks product company has outsourced their product development to an Indian vendor. The vendor has been late in delivering the project to such an extent that the original US company has lost it's competitive advantage in the market and with the downturn it may have also lost the window of opportunity.

We started to discuss the different approaches that are taken and why this has either worked / not worked in this particular case
- Getting a 3rd party to validate work : This is being done by an US company and the process has not been effective : could the main reason be that that this "validation" company does not
a) Understand the onsite-offshore play and is hence stuck in-between with no value add ?
or b) The intermediary is not involved in the product development process and hence is always having to fall back on "process" compliance / status reports to understand viewpoints ?
or c) A combination of the above 2 with a the real issue being that the intermediary is playing a "relay" role only and is not capable / empowered to make decisions ?


- Ensuring that a senior person capable of making decisions is working with the offshore team to validate delivery.
On this point, the discussion moved to the next question ie. "what is the value then of the offshore delivery team ?"

- Ensuring that someone from the offshore team acts on-behalf of the onsite team ?
Apparently, this was tried with very little success and the main reason for this being
a) Tendency of the senior management of the offshore team in taking the status mechanism and obscuring the real status !
b) Mixed messages between the team on ground and the reviewers
c) Incapable team leadership in terms of priority of issues to be addressed / sequencing (always supply driven sub-optimal solutions)

Notice though, that at NO time during the discussions, was there a question on the CAPABILITY of the delivery team ?


In the end, does it mean that we have just incapable project managers / general managers in the system ?

Or, are they supremely capable in "whitewashing projects" ?

Data access acceleration : HW or SW based GRID ?

For once, I thought I'd blog on a technical subject :-)

The question that has been in my mind is that - which is a better option for large volume data management - is an hardware solution better or a software solution - or even a combined one ?

About 2 months ago, at the Oracle Open World conference, I watched Larry Ellison announce the HP-Oracle DB machine. During the presentation, I was both bemused (with the idea that this was Larry’s / Oracle’s second venture into the hardware territory post NC) and the fact that for Oracle and HP to come up with this meant there was a real issue with the proliferating data.

As most of the readers would be aware, the last few quarters have seen a tremendous number of activities related to Virtualisation, Grid computing, Cloud computing and High volume data management. What are the options?

Hardware Options: Generally handled with Virtualisation and Grid computing effort as is also Custom Built machines (e.g: HP-Oracle DB machine). While it is a clean way to get to an array structure (CPU slices + Storage Array etc), I am not really sure if this is “efficient” – simply because, the core software / application was never written to take advantage of this.

Software Options : For a “pure” software option to work – there has to be two important components; A mechanism for Caching (In memory caches) and a mechanism for load balancing / splitting into parallel processing threads.

In my opinion, there is going to be a push for a combination of the two with distributed service architecture to manage the growing SOA / message structures inherently with a combination of GRID and CACHE (in memory).

I see three major players in the market today with fairly similar / competing offerings;

1. Oracle with it’s COHERENCE offering (Object oriented in memory DB cache) which is actually a product / company acquisition – Tangosol.
2. Gemstone with it’s GEMFIRE offering (again OODB / in memory DB cache) and
3. Gigaspaces with it’s XAP offering

The only issue I see with these offerings is that all the I/O needs to be re-configured / re-written using specific API’s to make use of the new features. This is a big issue, the questions to ask are; what is going to force the developers of COTS data access / reporting / application product suppliers (eg. Oracle, IBM-Cognos, SAP-BO etc) to provide this API access? Why would they invest in these during a downturn when no “new” product licenses are visible?

You can also see similar postings in the cross link at http://calsoftblog.blogspot.com/

Making a shared computer PERSONAL - An experiment in education

Disclosure - this is an overview post, please lookup Sikshana blog for actual details / instances etc.
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As part of the Sikshana process, Subbu (the resident computing / education expert) was posed with a simple question : If we distribute a laptop / class in the rural schools, how do individual students preserve their own environment and work over several days / periods / sessions ?

The problem seems simple - but, this has a major impact on the psyche of the individual kid. Today, if a child is working on a drawing / painting project, there is a good chance that while using the shared computer, another child will over-write / update / change the first child's work.

Even if that happens on a rare occasion, the child is left disillusioned about the whole project.
This is a tremendous problem not just with sharing, but, also with preserving the session as "active" so that there is no loss in time the next instance the child logs onto the system.

Subbu has come up with an ingenious solution (I believe). The idea is to provide a USB chip with enough software to make the chip the default session handler.

Every kid is given a 2 GB chip (Sikshana is in the process of distributing a 1000 of these to kids), which the child owns.

Every time the child accesses the computer, the child inserts his / her own chip and is up and away immediately. Saves time and also the heartbreak of having someone else destroy one's own work.

The question in my mind is : Is this not the same for offices too ? Can we not make this a commercial process ?

The mayhem at Bombay : What ails our security ?

After a long hiatus, I am forced today to blog - more out of anguish and anger. Anguish at the meaningless loss : of human life, dignity to a secure living and life as also property. Anger at the way we have been waiting for deliverance from these by our politicians and babus.

It is these 2 institutions that need to be questioned. I'm not even sure who the bigger culprit is ? Is it the IAS babu who is secure in his / her babudom or is it the politician working the vote banks to get ahead ?

Atleast, with politicians, we the citizens have to take part of the blame in having elected them. However, how about the Babus ?

I see the TV and listen to people mouth the same requirement again and again - co-ordination between the forces, secure border etc. How can we get that when we arm our forces (BSF, Coast gaurd, Police etc) with ancient .22 and .303 rifles / revolvers that are from WWII vintage and NO technology upgradation ?
I did not see night vision glasses, I did not see good smoke masks, I did not see even basic things like body armour. We push these dedicated people to the front and sing to their martyrdom, wait to shake their warm hands when they come back out live ?
I also do not think the structure is a problem - it is just execution.
There is "supposed" to be an emergency cell - atleast this was put together after the Tsunami disaster. There is supposed to be better intelligence sharing. There is a National Security Advisor !!. However, it is the effectiveness that is lacking.

What can be done. Here are a few suggestions - for whatever it is worth.
- Get a "technology" upgrade done immediately with state of the art equipment
- Get the local police and the central teams trained on these new equipment including things like frequency jammers and email traces.
- Get some of the key areas (atleast the public areas like Stations, airports etc) under 100% video surviellance ALL the time.
- Step up random checks on all the roads leading to major cities as also the coast.

I'm not sure if there is a 100% solution - atleast we should make it difficult and with no single point of failure. More importantly, we should pass this set itself to a professional team and not one made up of Politicians and Babus !

Teach India - will the format work ?

I have been watching the Teach India series of ads and the campaign with interest. Having been involved in Primary education for a number of years, the development / the campaign to do raise the awareness and create a media structure of "mass" volunteering is very interesting....

However, part of my skepticism and part experience is making me take a bit of a "back seat" and watch what happens next. The reason(s) being
- I've never seen campaigns that start to evoke the "feel good" factor really pick up steam
- In my interaction with the teachers in primary (esp rural) schools, there is a marked interest in continuity or we (the so called arm-chair intellectuals) run the risk of creating an "excuse" for the teachers / local influencers to point their finger and blame "another" set of people
- Continuity DOES NOT come by a few 2-3 hour sessions, IMHO it takes greater committment.
- Was speaking to a few people who have volunteered and ALL of them were looking at 9-11 kind of session once a week ie. on a Saturday. Have never seen this work either as Saturday AM is the most muddled time for a rural school

What has been good though is the campaign coverage. I do sometimes wonder what would be the "effect" if we had just run a similar campaign asking individuals to contribute an hour's salary and then "hire" real full-time teachers to teach ?
I am sure people will lampblast me for suggesting such an idea - but, I must confess, when it was proposed to me, I thought the "efficiency" of such a process should be much better ?

Getting people to "Visualize" in India

This is a post after a bit of a gap. I guess I'm as prone to the writers' block as anyone else ;-)

Thought I'd post a few comments on how we are NOT trained in our schools to visalize. ...

As most people in our Business Team will tell you, I have this pet peeve that people cannot put together a proposal if they cannot visualize the work to be done. This may sound insane, but, the idea is to get them to think about what needs to be done before they go about describing it in words.

This is exactly the same principle that is used in design (E-R diagrams, state diagrams, Business flow diagrams) or even in mindmaps.

Unfortunately, this continues to be a struggle. Probably the issue is much deeper ?

Late yesterday evening, I was in conversation with one of the senior members who was going to go to Chennai to train a few people. He mentioned that one of his standard questions to guage thinking capability is to ask people to "draw" the equation (a+b) square. ie. get people to explain the concept of why there should be the "2ab" portion. I was not surpised to hear that less than 30% of the people asked to explain could do so !

Maybe we should do a company wide session on visualization followed by De Bono's 6 thinking hats ?