Barefoot Education, Consulting and Analytics

We need to incorporate certain Western maxims into our value system, argues one of India’s m ost successful businessmen. The role of Western values in contemporary Indian society is a subject on which I have pondered for years. I come from a company that is built on strong values. Further, various stakeholders of our company, including employees, investors, customers and vendor-partners come from across the globe. In this context, over the years, there are several aspects of the Western value system that I have come to appreciate. Moreover, an organization is representative of society, and some of the lessons that I have learnt from the West regarding values are, I think, applicable to us as a nation. Here are some of them: Respect for the public good: Indian culture has deep-rooted family values – parents make enormous sacrifices for their children; children consider it their duty to take care of aged parents; and marriage is held to be a sacred union with husband and ...

N  R Narayana Murthy , Chairman of the Board and Chief Mentor, Infosys Technologies, outlines the key ingredients to building a great company and the role of 'compassionate capitalism' in society. Narayana Murthy is a co-chair of the Annual Meeting of the  World Economic Forum  at Davos, Switzerland . Excerpts from an interview with the Infosys Chairman: You are fond of using the term 'compassionate capitalism.' What does this mean in the context of India ? As I look back on the idealism of my youth, I realise that a socialist system will not succeed as a system, because people need opportunities, incentives and competition in order to better themselves. This is the essence of capitalism. Embellish the spirit of capitalism with fairness, decency, transparency and honesty, and the result is compassionate capitalism. Compassionate capitalism is extremely important for every society, in general, and for developing countries, in particular. In India, where th...

Paul Allen to open tech-focused office in Palo Alto  To look at early stage software, Internet, tech companies Latest move in Allen's 30-year tech investment career P aul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft  Corp , is opening an office in Silicon Valley to make new investments in emerging technology and internet companies. The Palo Alto office, set to open in the next few weeks, will operate under the name of Vulcan Capital, the investment arm of Allen's Seattle-based Vulcan Inc, which manages his personal fortune, valued at about $15 billion. Allen, 60, co-founded the world's largest software company with Bill Gates  in 1975, but left in 1983 after a bout with cancer. The riches he amassed through his large stake in the company, plus successful investments in sports and real estate, have made him the world's 53rd richest person, according to Forbes magazine. A pioneer in the early development of PC software and Microsoft's technical leade...

BANGALORE: Navin Kumar , CEO of iPrimed , a skills development organization, has a mandate from IT companies now to fill up some 2,000 positions with BSc and BCom graduates. A year ago, this number was just around 500. The demand for engineers has not risen anywhere as much as for BSc/BCom graduates. So about 60% of the requirement this year is for BSc/BCom graduates, against about 20-25% last year. "There is pressure on companies to cut costs. Also, many engineering graduates are no good," says Kumar, who was a senior executive in Infosys before he founded iPrimed. With the global economy still sluggish and the IT recovery still uncertain, companies are trying to contain costs, and non-engineering graduates are seen as a viable option to keep costs under control as also get certain kinds of work done that was previously done by engineers. Fresh non-tech grads are available for an annual salary of Rs 2 lakh, about half of what fresh tech grads are typi...

Training 1.       Fixing weakness or Building strengths 2.       Identifying Training objectives Some off the job training methods and objectives: 1.       Action Planning 2.       Behavior  Modelling training 3.       Brainstroming 4.       Business game 5.       Buzz group 6.       Case study Demonstration: 1.       E – Learning Experiential exercise: 2.       Field trip 3.       Group discussion 4.       Guest speaker 5.       Guided teaching 6.       Ice breaking 7.       Information search 8.       Intergroup exchange 9....