Ecofinglobe.com and its statistics from an year ago

I was chancing to look upon my blog’s readership and it has skyrocketed in last few months. To give you an idea of how much the readership for http://www.ecofin.wordpress.com has gone up by, Alexa rating has shown a consistent rise in my webpage ranking (it currently stands at 755139 worldwide and its India ranking is better at 58137. Furthermore, my year old blog stats shows my blog to have averaged 9999 hits way in May 2007. The current count stands at 77791.

Above means nothing if people don’t read posts. Simple page views/hits serve no value absolutely. The most important indicator that indicates the health status of a blog is its post:comment ratio. My blog’s average post:comment ratio is at about 1:2. This means, for every post I put up, I get double the # of comments. This ratio was about 2:1 last year at about the same time and it had not even reached breakeven. So, it is a satisfaction that my blog is a success in terms of these critical metrics.

Thank you, all for making this blog readable! Its only my readers who can turnaround this blog and I hope to keep you as repeat readers so the value of this blog is enhanced further!

Keep visiting back - you know where to look for me: http://www.ecofinglobe.com!

Lalunomics on Globonomics!

Source: Wiki

http://www.indianrail.gov.in/

http://www.indianrailways.gov.in/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Railways

This has been the single biggest turnaround in recent days of the Indian PSU sector! Indian Railways making a cash surplus (before dividend) of Rs. 25000 crore for 2007-2008 with an operating ratio of 76%.

Blogging guidelines - my two cents

What are the important factors one needs to consider before one begins to blog:

1. First, get over this obsession of Google adsense. 99/100 bloggers I meet first think of making a quick buck on adsense rather than focus on quality of their blogs and its relevance towards the topic(s) chosen! This is really very disturbing statistics.

Times NiE (Newspaper in education)

I was first exposed to this concept a long time back when I started becoming a news junkie. This was in school (Bishop Cotton Boys’ school, St. Marks road, Bangalore) where I did my schooling. There were journalists who were visiting us from Times of India to promote this NiE program - if I recollect, it was sometime in 1991/92.

Carly Fiorina’s memoir - Tough choices

http://www.amazon.com/Tough-Choices-Memoir-Carly-Fiorina/dp/159184133X 

For some reason, I have admired Carly Fiorina and publicly so on my peer networking group - Eco_Fin. I somehow felt that this lady had reached the upper echelons of a top US technology enterprise (to be the CEO of HP) by sheer guts and determination.

There are quite a few lady CEO’s who I admire who have made it big.

- Indira Nooyi - Chairman and CEO, Pepsico (NYSE: PEP)

- Carly Fiorina - ex. Chairman and CEO , Hewlett Packard company (NYSE: HPQ)

There was another book of Carly’s titled “Perfect enough” and the reinvention of Hewlett Packard that I had purchased and read up way back in 2003. It was good and spoke a lot of the aggressive and the controversies/hostilities surrounding the merger of HP and Compaq in 2002.

http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Enough-Fiorina-Reinvention-Hewlett/dp/1591840031/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-7956418-4984732?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173590442&sr=1-1

I have so far not got to read the following books:

- The HP way

- The Toyota way

I will do so shortly.

I am still reading up this book but she highlights the difficulties of her earlier years while at AT&T (American telephone and telegraph - NYSE: ATT), how Lucent technologies (NYSE: LU) was spun off, how the red splash logo of Lucent was conceived, how the baby bells were born etc.

I did not know that she did an advanced management programme at Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT), Boston, MA for an year while taking a sabbatical from AT&T.

IIFT peers doing well!

Just received an update from my IIFT peers that they have moved jobs and are into fairly high profile roles now.

One of them has mentioned that he is the Business development head for Asia Pacific and China for some MNC.

Another has mentioned that he has relocated to Denmark as a Regional head for their Sales/Marketing division.

Good for them and I wish them good luck!

Most of the others in our batch were anyway doing well already.

ex: We had a VP from Bank of America (BANA - http://www.bankofamerica.com/index.cfm) who used to head their GDIC who was from our batch, we had the head of HR of Ashok Leyland, we had senior people from Sales/marketing/BD background from Cummins, SHCIL, ICICI, Reliance, Swissre - http://www.swissre.com/.

The average age of people in our class was about 32 years. I was among the youngest to do the MIB at that time (2004) since I did it when I was 26.

Manager’s not MBA’s - Henry Mintzberg!

This is yet another powerful concept Henry Mintzberg introduces.

http://www.henrymintzberg.com/

He basically speaks about the disadvantages of the full-time MBA’s and encourages a concept where MBA’s are modeled more on peer experience bringing the real life experience in a classroom (similar to the EMBA programs) and not overrelying on theretical case studies.

A link to this can be obtained on the MIT world website. 

He says Managers needs to learn from their own experience, grow up the organization and then do the MBA’s in more of a sharing environment where experiences are exchanged.

I concur with his concept 100% - which is why I went for the IIFT EMIB program as opposed to a regular IIM MBA program. I believe real managerial experience or leadership is not a skill that can be taught. Analytical skills and topics can be taught - no one denies that - in an MBA classroom. He even takes on Harvard for the case study based approach and its fallacies!

Fascinating!

Topics covered during my Masters in International business

This blog entry is more on the personal front as a lot of readers of my personal blog ask me about the topics covered during my EMIB course at IIFT (http://www.iift.edu) so thought this might come in handy for someone looking to do a Masters in India or abroad in this specialized field.

So, I thought there should at least be one blog entry that summarizes what were the topics and how I fared in the same to gauge my own competancy in commenting about the topics chosen:

INDIAN INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN TRADE, NEW DELHI, A DEEMED UNIVERSITY

1st trimester

Business Economics
Marketing management
Business research methods
Management information systems
Managerial accounting
Global business environment
Human resource management

2nd trimester

Financial management
International brand management
International marketing research
Business strategy
WTO&IFTP
Trade documentation and logistics

3rd trimester

International financial management
Project appraisal and finance
International business strategy
Supply chain management
End term research project - A critical analysis of General Motor’s pricing strategy in North America

I scored a CGPA of 3.63 and stood in the top 10% of the class of 120 International managers in my class of peers where the average work experience was 10-years.

Here’s some quick tit-bit for passive reading that I just managed to coin (this has nothing to do with self-praise or patting myself on the back -its more of a fact of the prestigious institute from where I did this course):

I can say I stood in the top 10% of my class in a course (EMIB) that ranks among the top 10% of all the courses conducted by the institute in a course that is among the 10% of all courses conducted by similar B-schools (among the competing courses conducted by the other B-schools) across the country from a B-school (IIFT) that ranks among the top 10 (out of a total 1000 B-schools) in the country!