The Middle Ground

This blog is about the only guy in the world whom I put up with. In fact there may even be an iota of truth in the ridiculous suggestion made by the trout, that the mater(read Ma) loves him slightly more than me. Outrageous ideas like these are enough to make him the greatest enemy of my life but the curious observer in me decides otherwise. While I often wish that I was not so much like a man - tough, hard-hearted - I cannot be less amazed by how sensible a man my brother has turned out to be. He certainly chose some of the most amazing genes from our parents genetic pool to be born with. Although I may never speak about it, he does have a keen ear for music, an adorable sense of humour, love of math, a sense of responsibility, a kind heart filled with adoration for Ma and guts, gritty enough to tolerate the toughest of the hardships ever. Soft-spoken and gentle-mannered, the bloke turned 19 yesterday, with a bang, literally. Spending one's engineering years in ...

Global organizations follow a three-step procedure to attain growth and profit: innovate, scale-up and adapt. Interestingly, these three steps embody a contradiction. In order to exploit the creativity of the individuals who create innovations, organizations have to deploy them worldwide. But size may distort the innovation. Another paradox pertains to scaling-up and adapting. Cost savings derive from selling standard products everywhere, enabling extended production runs and learning-curve savings. That is, there is a continuous pressure to make products standard. But local markets often differ widely in culture, preferences and tastes. Adapting products for each type of market can be fatal for cost and profit margins. At the same time, excess-standardization ruins the product. General Motors over-standardized its cars, so that the once powerful car brands became homogenized look-alikes. The ultimate goal of innovation is sustained competitive advantage. Thus, it becomes imperative t...

Read part 1 here In a finitely repeated Spouses Dilemma there can be no other equilibrium. Consider this: In the course of their dispute, if John and the Lady(L) learn that they aren’t soul mates and decide to be together just for a finite period of time, say 10 days, they’ll loaf till the 10th day. We can determine this by reasoning in reverse: On the last they, both of them will know that they have no chances to reward or punish each other further, so both of them will loaf. (If either one of them cleans, then he/she is not sticking to the plan and cares enough about the future so as to influence the behaviour of the other. Here we assume both of them behave like androids) On the second-last day, L knows that John will loaf on that day as well as the next day so L has no incentive to clean. So she loafs. John reasons similarly and does the same. Reasoning in a similar fashion backwards, we find that both of them loaf on all days, regardless of whether they part after 10 ...