Banking -- Is transformation imminent in the West?

Michael Geoghegan, HSBC Group's chief executive, presents his views on the emerging markets such as Asia, Middle East and Latin Americas in his talk at RSA.  Half way through his talk,  he also highlights the state of the affairs in the West with regards to the capital markets and suggests what role should the West play in the continuously changing eco-system. With the backdrop of slow growth and development in the West and in contrast, the east and the south charging forward with impressive GDP growth numbers, he argues that the West should take much more participative role in the world markets, rather than keeping itself on the sidelines and delineating itself from the growth prospects happening elsewhere.
The conversation ends up in a somewhat loaded question to the outgoing chief as to whether HSBC would move its HQ to Hong Kong, if the Unilateral Banking reforms were to enforce banks such as Barclays and HSBC to split up into small groups.  Capital markets around the world in 34 minutes via RSA.org. Between the first term in Shanghai, China and our next term in London, the talk very much sums up the kind of issues that we are tackling in our Cross-continent program.

Don Valentine, Sequoia Capital: "Target Big Markets"

Since founding Sequoia Capital in 1972, Don Valentine has financed many of the companies (Apple, Oracle, Electronic Arts, NVIDIA, Cisco, Google, YouTube, etc.) that have been Silicon Valley's biggest technology and business success stories. In this View From The Top talk given at Stanford Graduate School of Business, he describes some of the insights that allowed him to lead Sequoia through almost four decades of disruptive changes, creating several new industries along the way. Don mentions that all along the lifespan of Sequoia, their main Strategy has been to focus on the size of the market and magnitude of the problem that the entrepreneur is trying to solve. They look at the system view of the market, targeting multiple companies in the space that make up the ecosystem. The video is worth watching, as Don walks through the examples of Apple, Cisco, Sony, Xerox and Zappos giving great insights on starting new ventures. Notable Quotes / Advice:
Most important thing to learn is: how to ask a question. Constantly work on perfecting the questioning skills.
Learn the art of story telling. Can you write your business plan on the back of your business card?
As to failures, he admits that their failures have been more related to the failure of recognizing the market, and not the failure of technology that was at the core of the startup. As a VC, they do have lot of failures which they follow up with extensive  postmortems studying what questions they failed to ask in the deliberation phase, and what answers they failed to understand. via YouTube - Don Valentine, Sequoia Capital: "Target Big Markets", via GigaOm.

London countdown begins

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While watching the Shanghai skyline fade away in the rear view mirror and tires still spitting smoke from the burnouts, the race to London-Term 2--has already begun. Program office was not shy of sending out material for next term before the official end of term1. It is a funny feeling. Yesterday, my wife came to me saying --"Honey, your schedule shows a break from 12 to 15th October". I couldn't stop myself from laughing, ironically. The definition of term break is used quite loosely in this case. Well, if you can finish the truck load of reading in less than a week, then yes you have 3 days break. Or else, you better start reading the material.

The picture shows the reading material that came in the mail last week, while we were still struggling with our finals for term1. Now that everything related to term1 is done with, the grades have started to show up. Managerial Effectiveness already has the grades out, which I think I pretty much nailed it. Not to mention, it was one of my favorite and most practical course in the first term. On the other hand, I am not too excited to hear about accounting even though final was not that bad for me as the mid-term. Let's see when Miss Katherine drops the bomb. With almost a week to the flight to Heathrow, I need to get geared up for the new Residency Blast.

Server Migration

I just moved to a new hosting provider, hence you don't see the old posts. I do have backup of old wordpress blog, which I am still trying to figure out the best way to reload in the new database. With term 2 reading assignments stacking up, trying to break my head with database issues is just a waste of time at this moment. Hopefully, if I can catchup with my reading, I can spend some time on the recovery.