R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah

Once a darling of industry, the supply chain-focused Dell has lost its growth and value as a raft of new MBA leaders – mostly recruited from consultancy Bain & Company – have kept applying traditional industrial management with its cost curves and economy-of-scale illogic to a market racked by the introduction of new products such as smartphones and tablets. -  Why Steve Jobs Couldn’t Find a Job Today , Forbes Blog

Personally, I don't value MBA degree (even though I have met and had very knowledgeable friends at college). For me, it's a hyped and useless degree. Most of the MBAs I have seen are pure Juggu Boys (sycophants) and irrational cabals, who can't take any decision on their own, but can only create chaos and politics. That's one of the reasons I like Paul Graham of Y-Combinator . He's a great icon for Hackers (to get back the respect). I just stumbled upon this link through Hacker News where TIME magazine reports on Bob Lutz's latest book Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business . Some interesting notes: we need to fire the M.B.A.s and let engineers run the show. "if you can measure it, you can manage it" The only time Apple ever lost the plot was when it put the M.B.A.s in charge.  "Shoemakers should be run by shoe guys, and software firms by software guys."

Steve Jobs , CEO of Apple Inc sometimes walk in barefoot in their comapus (I don't know, how I missed this earlier!). They're able to use/market it to differentiate themselves. Whenever some newcomer or new manager--influenced by British colonial rule, visits our team, they complain about barefoot and casual dressed hackers. For years, I have been defending that they're not intentional but they're geekish. Had I known this earlier, I would have compared Apple Inc culture with our team! Not to mention that our Online Marketing Manager (who's from London but working in Chennai) never wears suit or tie. He once told me that he wears suit only on Christmas dinner and for funeral.

MBAs Vs Hackers war is always on and hackers win with creating Linux to Firefox internationally. But, in India, coding is always considered to be a lower end job . In the international hacker cult, they code, code and code even at their 60s. In India, MBAs always take a lead saying "anybody can code", so every programmer is forced to "switch" to leadership role. Another problem with India is that there is no "real hacker" comparable with International cult. I have been lamenting this for years and smelling the "gap" for years. I've consoled myself with "Learner, Hacker, Idiot" tag in LinkedIn profile. Recently I noticed some guys who branded themselves as hackers when they're bashing MBAs in Quora . Having impressed by their "attitude", I checked their product and found nothing better than StockFox . Some hacker chauvinistic links I'm fond of: The Hacker FAQ How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, ...

Recently I had an interesting conversation with someone who brought me a new theory that integrating sales team and development team "closely" will increase the productivity. Conversation went on like these: Someone: Sales team and development team should work closely for better productivity. Me: What are the IT companies having such setup? What are the IT companies that increased productivity through such setup? Someone: (No answer) Me: How have you arrived at that theory? Someone: 'coz the sales team will get more technical questions and only when they closely work with the development team, they can able to answer . Later I felt that the person is somewhat right, the problem lies with the customer base and the person's inability to bring better solution. Then, I come to an analogy of Waiter, Cook and customer base in a hotel. Waiter, Cook and customer base in Hotel Here, the Waiter can be compared with the IT salesman and Cook can be compared with the developer. F...

"If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you'll learn something important about business school. After Warren Buffett, you don't hit another MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only 5 MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you'd do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA." Paul Graham in How to start a startup But, I'm very much amused, in real world, how such sane hackers are been ruled and overtaken by sales, marketing and HR guys. How those guys put the words into hackers mouth and outsmart? On a second thought, it must be for God's sake....

In the developer world, royalty concept is not widespread, but glad that Apple has introduced the royalty through App Store. What's in royalty? You--the developer code a piece of logic for a company and it get sold and start milking; but you don't get anything even if it sells more than million copies. Apple's App Store is a novel concept that the developer acts as a company and directly gets sales commission. Why royalty is important? A book author gets royalty, a film maker gets it, an artist gets it--but not a developer. A developer has to code, code, code to live. Who can change the scenario? After open source revolution, I think, it's time for "royalty revolution". We need a movement like "free software movement" by Richard Stallman to take the royalty concept to all developers. In short, we need an open source "App Store"