On Brokers:

When I was growing up, Doordarshan was the only channel available. There used to be a television serial called Gul Gulshan Gulfam which was shot in backdrop of Dal Lake, Kashmir. Many times it used to portray that carpet makers in Kashmir are poor because they don’t get a fair price for carpets woven by them. They receive only about a fraction of the market price in Western Markets. And the blame was laid on brokers. The serial made an assumption that brokers are exploiters. I faithfully believed the serial then. I heard and believed similar arguments ascribing poor conditions of agricultural laborers. If was often argued, that a substantial chunk of profits are always eaten by the market brokers like traders etc. and the agricultural farmers are poor as a result. In fact many farmer poverty alleviation schemes are based on the premise of elimination of brokers. Brokers generally have a negative connotation. People generally loathe brokers, and treat with suspicion every percentage cut they make. Having grown up, I think that this argument is one of the biggest myths and misconceptions that floats around, and genuinely believed by masses. The carpet weavers were not poor because brokers were exploiting them. The carpet weavers were poor because relatively more carpet producers are competing for proportionately smaller set of carpet brokers. This gives a bigger bargaining leverage to broker, and he manages to strike the equilibrium price of carpets lower that look ridiculously low. There is a still significant price multiple between broker’s acquisition price, and brokers selling price, and I will discuss it in another blog post. To remove this inequity, the bargaining leverage has to shift to weaver’s side. There are two ways of achieving it. Reducing the number of weavers or increasing the number of brokers. Governments’ typical response to similar problems is to come up with solutions that bypass brokers which reduces the number of brokers even further, and increases the bargaining leverage manifold in broker’s favor. So the weaver’s suffering gets compounded, and his prices gets further beaten down. Any good solution will aim to increase the number of brokers(number of weavers is not a control variable) instead of bypassing them, and create mechanism for fair play among brokers. The brokers will start competing for same set of weavers, and the price will shift in favor of weaver. Brokers are not bad.

I am working on a very non-conventional proposal. One of my probable clients wants us to develop an entire digital Scrambler Module for Motorola Professional Series Radio. He already has an analog version of scrambler and he wants a digital one. Initially I had the information that he needs a Cryptographer who could design a digital scrambling algorithm for him. We have a cryptography oriented team that we had cultivated since inception, so I thought this would be good work for my cryptography team, and I approached the probable client. After discussions, we realised that he needed not only the algorithm, but the entire associated system that would lead him to put the algorithm into a chip that could be mounted on the radio. So we offered the client development of algorithm and consulting services for burning the algorithm into a mountable chip. The proposal had three stages: Development of algorithm that could meet specific performance requirements of a handheld class application with adequate security, consulting services for testing and prototyping the algorithm into a chip. Once the prototyping is done, we offered consulting services for selection of a vendor who could mass manufacture the chip. We quoted a price that factored in charges of our consulting services. Actual costs involving hardware components would have to be borne by the client.

The client came back to us and said he wanted an all inclusive price consisting of consulting costs, hardware component costs, software development costs, chip fabrication costs, tool costs and manufacturing costs. He said that he would just pay money and every other headache would be ours. But he would want to know the cost upfront. Our core competency in this case was just cryptogrphic system design, and we had offered manufacturing related consulting services as a value add. We don't know the actual costs and we don't know how many iterations of manufacturing cycle will go on before we perfect the product. Its a very risky engagement. Before puttiing up a revised proposal we need to know every single step and every single cost. We have to factor in unforceable events, and price of it. At the end of it the number should not scare the probable customer. Otherwise he will postpone the decision.

We decided to go ahead with the proposal, and now we are researching what it takes to meet the requirements. Basically the work we should have done after the engagement award is being done before proposal. But we want to do it. This offers us a chance to learn what is takes to bring a security design into hardware. We have another product called ControlCase (www.controlcase.com), and this engagement could help us getting a hardware version of it. We will learn the entire VLSI cycle and possible pitfalls.

We started with getting papers on existing security algorithms being put on chip, and doing research on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array)/CMOS based VLSI implementations. We have the rough outline of emerging algorithm, and we now know the coding language for electronic design(VHDL and Verilog). We understand the VHDL->RTL->Simulation->Synthesis->PlugNRoute cycle for FPGAs. I have even tried my hand on VHDL coding to get a feel. So we have outline of core areas.

But going through other details, I am getting scares. We don't have full listing of analog scrambling functions in old scrambler. Its just not security but functions like ANI at the end of TX, No-mute during lead-in delay, silent signalling, data operated squelch, and a couple of others. We don't even have the signal diagram of old scrambler. Its just not an algorithm, but a full system that has to be put on the digital scrambling board whose specifications are not known to us. If we don't even know what we are buiding, how can we build it? The client does not know about it, and Motorola will never tell us its internal signalling/function formats. But yet, I want to do it. I took an evening off yesterday so that I could get my mind off..but today the complexity of problems remain, and no solution in sight.

In almost no time, I got a clarification on Copyrights issue Blog Newspaper on my blog site. This is how an idea takes traction, and illustrates the power of blogging. It seems that the copyright owner is the content creator of the blog. So now we have another problem: Newspapers have to report events in almost real time basis or at worst next day basis. If the blog-newspaper editor has to wait till the blog owner gives his permission to print, the news might loose its relevance. We are in a roadblock.

To remediate, we could add a line at the title "copyrights belongs to the content creator". But even then the blog newspaper wouldn't have express permission of the blogger.

Recently we have instituted a Performance Measurement system in OSP India. I have seen inherent deficiencies in convention performance appraisal system. Typically they rate people in a scale of 1 - 5 on various parameters, and an aggregate score is evaluated. Employees are handed out their bonuses and salary hikes on the basis of their aggregate rating. More often than not, the rating parameters are very subjective. If you are a good performer, but not a good socializer, its possible that the system will punish you. Having 5 grades clubs horses with donkeys, and is not fined grained enough. When I was doing my MBA in NITIE, 71% and 79% had the same grade, and it used to cause a lot of heartburn for 79 percenter. Our performance appraisal system is continuous, activity based, and scored in a scale of 100. If can be compared to School Report Card system. Every employee has to be rated to two parameters Quality(Scale 100) and Ability to meet deadline for the activity(Scale 100) for every activity they perform. This rating is done immediately on the completion of the activity by the evaluator who is the person in charge of the activity. This system is easy to administer, as the evaluator has to enter only 2 scores for every activity. It is continuous, as evaluations are done continously throughout the year. It is free from subjective parameters like sincerity, dedication, initiative taking capabilities, presentation skills etc.

Another feature is that scorecard of every employee can be seen by everyone else. This would give everyone a measure of how much one stands with respect to other guys. There could be evaluator biases. Some evaluators are known to be being harsh and some very liberal. We have to develop bias correction mechanism where liberal evaluator scores are reduced, and harsh evaluator scores are increased. Also increments/bonuses would be a function of one's score. So it is technically possible that no two persons get the same bonus/increments. Right now we are keeping all the records in an excel sheet. Once the system is perfected we will develop an IT system around it. Establishment of an accurate Performance Appraisal system is a very important in my list of priorities.

OSP Ideas

OSP Ideas: A lot of ideas come through our team. Most of these ideas get lost after a round of discussions. There should be a way to tap this latent idea base. I have been thinking on this for some time. Today Raja was explaining me the popularity that Rajesh Jain's blog Emergic has achieved. This led to our discussing whether blogs are going to replace newspapers. I felt not, as even now TV has not been able to replace Radio, and 24 hrs news channels have not been able to replace newspapers. So an idea was born. Why not start a newspaper with content created entirely out of blogs. From today, we have a new initiative called OSP Ideas which will try to concretize the latent ideas of our people.

OSP Ideas will have a page in our web-site. There would be multiple stages. Concept stage, Pilot Implementation stage, funding solicing stage and full implementation stage. It would be interesting to see what emerges out of OSP Ideas.

We can have a wiki page created for OSP Ideas which could be freely editable by employees. Over a period of time, we will develop OSP Ideas and give it a formal form.

Coming back to Blog based newspaper: such a newspaper could encompass content which could be better than the best of staff created contents in world's best newspapers. That would be the key differentiator, and critical success factor for such an initiative. Copyrights would be a key issue. Right now the issue of copyrights in blog world has not been debated. It is assumed that content in blog is freely shareable. But if subsequently the legal world establishes that copyrights would be implicitly owned the author, a part of revenues will have to be shared with the authors whose content has been published. The payments could depend on a content rating scheme.

I have recently come back from a trip to Pushkar, Rajasthan. This was a unscheduled break caused due to the death of my grandmother. My dad and mom joined me from Sanctoria, West Bengal. It was almost 5 years since I had taken a long time out with my parents. We had some interesting time together in Rawatbhata near Kota where my brother works as a Scientific Officer in Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited. Finally I got to teach my dad how to browse through Internet.

This also gave me an occasion and time to think where I am headed and refocus on things I want to achieve from here. One of the decisions I have taken is that I am going to blogs my thoughts regularly. It is going to help me crystallize my thoughts, and give me a written account of personal decisions I have made at various points. And on top of that it is a fantastic medium of having conversation with myself. Till now I had been very circumspect in leaving signatures on Internet.

I lead an organization in India, and one of the issues I had to encounter in making the blog decision was the potential of this medium to give advance clues about our strategy to our potential competitors. Google for instance does not appreciate employees writing blogs and releasing inside information. Mark Jen's firing within 11 days of being hired in Google for writing blogs is folklore. Google believes in guerilla style market attack strategy and any possible revelation of its plans can cause strategic loss and its competitors to push up their guards.

We will try to bring up our company the transparent way. To the maximum extent possible, we will let the world know what we do, how we do and what we plan to do. If our competitors take a leaf from that, well the game only becomes more interesting. If we are to be a winning company, we should win irrespective of whatever our competitors know, and whatever they do.