World is Green

I sometimes think Apple is a social experiment that is trying to see how far it can push people to buy things they didn’t ask for but now want because they’ve seen them.

In some ways Swami Ramdev harks back to India’s earliest leaders with a message of self-reliance, national pride and traditional Indian values. But with his vast yoga empire and legions of followers on television and the Web, he is also a product and symbol of the New India, a yogic fusion of Richard Simmons, Dr. Oz and Oprah Winfrey, irrepressible and bursting with Vedic wisdom.

In 2005 when I was leaving to Australia a good friend of mine, Sharat gave a CD of Ramdev teaching yoga. I never could get into a habit of doing it.

When Bindu was pregnant with Anika she followed the Ramdev yoga for pregnant women. However, when my parents visited us in Adelaide it all changed.

Seeing them regularly perform pranayama and yoga everyday made a huge difference.

We now both follow the teachings of Ramdev and it has made a big difference in our health.

So to put this into some sort of context… Perhaps yoga is even better for you than walking, but walking is pretty good too. If you want to give your brain a regular boost, this adds additional evidence to our existing knowledge that exercise — all kinds of exercise — will help. You can probably do nothing better to keep your brain mentally healthy than to engage in some sort of regular exercise.

Ten years ago, executives pored over numbers and set their 2010 sales goal at $140 billion — four times the amount in 2000. Sales will reach that level this year, according to the median estimate of 21 analysts — right on target.

For the one-time imitator to become a pioneer, hitting the numbers will be just the beginning.

I used to sit down on the job. For hours a day, derriere planted firmly in chair, I read, wrote, and edited. It’s been a torment — I love what I do, but I hate to sit. Over the years, I’ve developed little tricks to burn off excess energy and add activity bits throughout the day, like bouncing my right leg and printing to a printer far down the hallway.

I’ve discovered something better. A few months ago, I fired my chair and brought in a stand-up desk. This move has made a huge difference in my work day. My back isn’t so achy. I’m taking several thousand more steps each day. I feel more alert, especially in the afternoon, and it seems like I am getting more done each day.

My recommendation is to introduce eight-ball into school curricula, but in a specific way. Each kid would be required to keep a log of hours spent practicing on his own time, and there would be no minimum requirement. Some kids could practice zero hours if they had no interest or access to a pool table. At the end of the school year, the entire class would compete in a tournament, and they would compare their results with how many hours they spent practicing. I think that would make real the connection between practice and results, in a way that regular schoolwork and sports do not. That would teach them that winning happens before the game starts.

Yes, I know that schools will never assign eight-ball for homework. But maybe there is some kid-friendly way to teach the same lesson.

We recently attended the launch of Xerox’s Innovation Hub in Chennai (a major South Indian city), their first such venture outside the developed world. The initial mission of the Xerox India Innovation Hub is to develop document management solutions that are relevant to emerging market countries and, at the same time, that help innovate solutions and services delivery worldwide.

India, of course, has been a major destination for R&D among Western firms for some time now. Texas Instruments was leader of the pack, opening their R&D center in Bangalore way back in 1985. More multinationals followed suit in the 1990s. In 2000, GE founded the John F. Welch Technology Center in Bangalore, which is now GE’s largest lab outside the US. And the story is similar for IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, and many others. Our research shows that Fortune 500 companies currently operate 63 “captive” R&D facilities in India (i.e., “captive” in the sense that these MNCs totally own and control all the physical and human resources available in these labs).

So what took Xerox so long? And are they too late coming to the R&D game in emerging markets?

In fact, what appears like imitation on Xerox’s part is really a reframing of innovation in a global context. Indeed, we believe that Xerox is pioneering a whole new way in managing global R&D. Namely: creating lean and nimble innovation hubs in emerging markets which don’t take the traditional “captive” route of owning all resources. Instead, these hubs focus on partnering with local universities and start-ups to get scale and speed in taking cutting-edge ideas to market.