Today's Vivekananda Quote

Mind you, this is life's experience: if you really want the good of others, the whole universe may stand against you and cannot hurt you. It must crumble before your power of the Lord Himself in you if you are sincere and really unselfish.

Poor quality of Original Bajaj Spare Parts

Hi All,

Do not purchase the original Bajaj spares from any where, they do not even audit the quality of the spares they are supplying in the market. They are defective,

The story,

I always replace my spark plug in a period of 6-8 months (even the working ones) as it help in the efficiency of the engine and pick remains constant.

Last month, as I was schedule for the change, I went to a shop in Kothrud, pune for the same and bought the original bajaj spark plug "the carton attached for the reference".

I removed the old ones and placed it at my home and had the new original spark plug installed on the bike, in less then 05 days, when I was driving from my office at 20 45 hrs, the vehicle stalled in between of nowhere and Luckily I checked for the spark plug first, the spark wire and its cap came smooth out and to clean the contact points of the wire and the spark plug, I fingered them both with soft cloth, I was shocked to see the crown of the spark plug was moving. As I know that the sensitive required for the crown and the carbon brush below, there was no chance for repair on the same component and is permanently damaged.

As I work with some critical components myself, I know in the first sight itself that the quality controls for the products deployed for production are bad. The adhesive that these people use is not used in the proper quantity or applied bad or is substandard.

Why we should buy Bajaj spare parts if they are of so inferior quality? where they do not even are ready for quality control of their vendor?

I contacted the Bajaj people, the turn around time is more then a week. On warning of the publishing the same on the web, I received the call, the guy from the Sai was speechless and was unaware for even who the supplier was of bajaj for Spark plug champion/nkg/other. 

I insist on filling CAPA forms for two incidences, one for critical operation failure and secondly for undefined post marketing feedback on the products.

In the photos shown below, you can clearly see the crown has been detached by unscrewing/ loosing and not by any force. Also you can see the new shining of the components.

This is the critical parameter failure for a component especially in some of the industries like aerospace or MS standards. Shame on Bajaj QMS, you are investing money for no good cause.

I am pasting the email conversation for which I have received no reply or some canned reply which are not essential for the resolutions.

I am posting such article only to show, that the original spare parts are not reliable and especially Bajaj, please do not accept their claims for a quality products.

I do not hope for an answer from bajaj or any of the service vendors.

My Email correspondence:-

5:31:56 +0530

Dear Bajaj Customer Care,

Thanks for your reply, I am seeking the information about the vendor who manufactures the spark plugs. They have defective manufacturing process.

None the less please find he details below:-

Registration No. -
Service Dealer/Agency Name - Shop near kothrud police station pune

I have the original packing of the same and I will have the photo of the defect and the carton soon with me, though the cost of the spark plug is only 85Rs, It costed me a lot of time, pushing the same to the nearest shop.

I request you to please help me regarding the same.

Regards,

---

From: customerservice@bajajauto.co.in
To: 
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:58:36 +0530
Subject: RE: Manufacturing Defects of the Spark Plug

 

Dear Sir

We are in receipt of your mail and noted the contents. We would request you to provide few details mentioned below  so that our Service/Sales Team would get in touch with you.

Registration No. - Number mention on number plate
Bike CC-
Service Dealer/Agency Name -

State - NA

City - NA
Date of Purchase - NA 

With Warm  Regards
Customer Care Cell

 

---

From:
Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 9:52 AM
To: CUSTOMER SERVICE
Subject: Manufacturing Defects of the Spark Plug

Dear Bajaj,

I had purchased a spark plug (pulsar) long threaded one for my vehicle 02 weeks ago. But yesterday, my vehicle stopped because of the defective spark plug, (champion brand).The defect is manufacturing defect because the crown/terminal has been unscrewed from the ribs of the spark plug. And been a sensitive contact point the electric current stopped causing the failure of the component. There is failure from your vendor for the applying suitable qty of the adhesive with the same.

Such incidences, cause degradation of trust for the brand bajaj/champion also as favor penalize the vendor for such defects, Kindly replace the spark plugs and also provide me the contact details of your vendors for filing of CAPA.

Regards,

www.mypulsar.com www.bajajauto.com DISCLAIMER: This message, including any attachments may contain proprietary, confidential & privileged information for the sole use of the intended recipient(s), and is protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, notify sender or mailadmin@bajajauto.co.in immediately and destroy all copies of the original message & attachments, if any. Any unauthorized use, disclosure, printing or copying of this email is prohibited. Bajaj Auto and/or its group companies reserve the right to record & monitor all email communications, to prevent the information systems from being used to view, store or forward offensive material. Please ensure you have adequate virus protection before opening the mail or attachments from this transmission and we do not accept any liability for viruses.

Keywords, Defective Bajaj,Defective Bajaj Spare Parts,Defective Bajaj Pulsar spare parts,Defective Spark plug India, Bajaj pulsar, Defective Spark plug Pune, Defective Bajaj Spare Parts Pune, Problems with bajaj spare parts, Bajaj Sucks, Champion Spark Plug and poor customer service bajaj. CAPA Critical failure, vehicles, defective spare parts Bajaj,Do not buy Bajaj vehicles. Sai service pune, service centre pune bajaj,

Gary McKinnon – 'world's most dangerous hacker' – to be extradited

The Guardian, out of the United Kingdom, is reporting that Gary McKinnon, the "world's most dangerous hacker", will be extradited to the United States to face criminal hacking charges. McKinnon, a 42 year old unemployed systems administrator from north London, allegedly hacked into systems belonging to the US army, navy, air force, and Nasa in 2001. From the article:

He said he was merely searching for evidence of extraterrestrial life, but American officials labeled him the world's most dangerous hacker and accused him of deleting important files and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of damage.

According to prosecutors, McKinnon scanned more than 73,000 US government computers and hacked into 97 machines belonging to the US army, navy, air force and Nasa.

Not to stick up for this guy, but I am not sure that scanning 73,000 machines and hacking into 97 of them qualifies someone as the "world's most dangerous hacker". Certainly he is not harmless, but I have to believe there's a lot of hackers out their with a bigger trophy case than McKinnon's. This is not to trivialize what he has done, I just worry that the US may be over-sensationalizing this to play into their case.

The Guardian article claimed:

His lawyers have fought vigorously against the extradition, arguing that McKinnon could face up to 60 years in prison as a result of his actions, and could even be classed as an "enemy combatant" and interned at Guantánamo Bay. Instead they argued that he should face prosecution under Britain's more lenient computer crime laws because he carried out the hacking from his bedroom in London.

McKinnon is certain to get harsh treatment here, but has he caused enough damage to warrant 60 years in prison and a trip to Gitmo? The article talked about what comes next for McKinnon and his legal team:

In a statement, McKinnon's legal team said it would be taking the appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

"Gary McKinnon is neither a terrorist nor a terrorist sympathizer," the statement said. "His case could have been properly dealt with by our own prosecuting authorities. Instead, we believe that the British government declined to prosecute him to enable the US government to make an example of him.

"American officials involved in this case have stated that they want to see him 'fry'. The consequences he faces if extradited are both disproportionate and intolerable and we will be making an immediate application to the European Court to prevent his removal."

Nortel hacking attack went unnoticed for almost 10 years

The term "Advanced Persistent Threat" has been pooh-poohed by many as snake oil sales-speak but for the folks at Nortel Networks, it is very, very real.

According to an eye-opening Wall Street Journal report, hackers who appeared to be working in China broke into Nortel's computer networks more than a decade ago and over the years downloaded technical papers, research-and-development reports, business plans, employee emails and other documents.

The report (subscription required) said the hackers used seven passwords stolen from top Nortel executives, including the CEO and maintained a persistent presence by hiding spying software "so deeply within some employees' computers that it took investigators years to realize the pervasiveness of the problem."

The initial breach occurred as far back as 2000 but Nortel didn't discover the threat until 2004, when an employee noticed that a senior executive appeared to be downloading an unusual set of documents, according to the internal report. When asked about it, the executive said he hadn't downloaded the documents.

From the report:

Mr. Shields and a handful of the firm's computer-security officers soon learned that hackers had apparently obtained the passwords of seven top officials, including a previous CEO. The hackers had been infiltrating Nortel's network, from China-based Internet addresses, at least as early as 2000, Mr. Shields and his colleagues determined.

Hackers had almost complete access to the company's systems, Mr. Shields said, because the internal structure of Nortel's network posed few barriers. "Once you were on the inside of the network, it was soft and gooey," he said.

About six months later, Mr. Shields said, he saw signs that hackers were still in the system. Every month or so, a few computers on the network were sending small bursts of data to one of the same Internet addresses in Shanghai involved in the password-hacking episodes. Unexpected transmissions like these—where one computer sends a quick "ping" to another—often suggests the presence of spyware, security experts say.

"That's the really deep covert presence," said one person familiar with Nortel's investigation. "There is something on those computers that's doing that, and finding it is very difficult."

Advanced Persistent Threats, or APT, is code-speak for Chinese hackers and the Nortel breach is another sign that high-profile technology companies are a major target for resourceful hacking groups looking for intellectual property and valuable data.

Several major U.S. companies including Google, Adobe, Lockheed Martin, Juniper Networks fell victim to APT attacks over the last few years.

NASA: Hackers had 'full functional control'

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has finally revealed how badly it was attacked by hackers last year. The space agency's Inspector General Paul Martin explained in a testimony to Congress how NASA's computer network was penetrated by hackers at least 13 times in 2011.

Furthermore, one China-based breach in November resulted in total control of crucial systems and employee accounts at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), including full system access, the ability to modify/copy/delete sensitive files, and even upload hacking tools for wreaking further havoc. The personal credentials of 150 employees were stolen. The attack involving Chinese IP addresses is still under investigation.

Here's an excerpt of the 10-page report, titled "NASA Cybersecurity: An Examination of the
Agency's Information Security" (PDF), written by the Office of Inspector General (OIG):

In FY 2011, NASA reported it was the victim of 47 APT attacks, 13 of which successfully compromised Agency computers. In one of the successful attacks, intruders stole user credentials for more than 150 NASA employees – credentials that could have been used to gain unauthorized access to NASA systems. Our ongoing investigation of another such attack at JPL involving Chinese-based Internet protocol (IP) addresses has confirmed that the intruders gained full access to key JPL systems and sensitive user accounts. With full system access the intruders could: (1) modify, copy, or delete sensitive files; (2) add, modify, or delete user accounts for mission-critical JPL systems; (3) upload hacking tools to steal user credentials and compromise other NASA systems; and (4) modify system logs to conceal their actions. In other words, the attackers had full functional control over these networks.

Another security failure occurred in March, when an unencrypted NASA notebook computer containing algorithms to command and control the International Space Station, was stolen. NASA insists the station was never in any jeopardy. The report also noted that only 1 percent of NASA's mobile computing devices are encrypted, and 48 were stolen between April 2009 and April 2011.

In a separate event, hackers grabbed the user credentials belonging to more than 150 employees, which in turn could have been used to gain unauthorized access to NASA systems. Martin admitted the agency failed to move quickly enough to ensure those hackers wouldn't be able to take advantage of the credentials.

Martin's report further reveals that NASA saw more than 5,408 incidents of malicious software or unauthorized access of its computers between October 1, 2010, and September 30, 2011. NASA estimated the total cost of these security incidents at more than $7 million. The written testimony was delivered Wednesday to a hearing of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology's Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight.

OIG investigators have conducted more than 16 separate investigations of NASA computer network breaches over recent years. The motivation of the hackers ranged from "individuals testing their skill to break into NASA systems, to well-organized criminal enterprises hacking for profit, to intrusions that may have been sponsored by foreign intelligence services." Hacking suspects have been arrested in China, Estonia, Great Britain, Italy, Nigeria, Portugal, Romania, and Turkey.

"NASA has made significant progress to better protect the agency's IT systems and is in the process of implementing the recommendations made by the NASA Inspector General in this area," a NASA spokesperson said in a statement.

5 Deadly Sins of Social Content

Two of the hottest topics in the digital marketing space over the past year have been social media and content marketing. The funny thing is, content has been "hot" for a very long time. In particular, the B2B world has used content to romance customers across long buying cycles with great success for many years. But with increased importance among consumers, search engines, and social platforms, online marketers are emphasizing content in the marketing mix now more than ever.

Content isn't king, it's the kingdom, because without it, search wouldn't exist and social networks would be dry.

As online marketers catch on to the content marketing trend, they're often viewing and implementing through the lens of what they already know. For example, SEOs often think of content marketing as simply adding more content to what they're currently doing or adding length to avoid negative effects from a Google Panda update.

Public relations professionals often think of content marketing for social media in terms of what achieves the most distribution and social shares since it's exposure that they're most often held accountable to.

The reality is, content marketing isn't just better quality or more content that gets great distribution. Content marketing is thoughtful creation of information designed for a particular audience and specific outcomes as an individual object and as part of an overall strategy. Content is an educational vehicle that can guide prospective customers through the journey from awareness to advocacy, across the entire customer lifecycle.

To help guide proactive marketers toward a more productive path, here are five common social content "sins" to avoid.

1. A Failure to Plan Is a Plan to Fail

While experimenting with social media applications and platforms is a practical first step, many companies seem to think that it's a strategy. Goals, audience, and approach can allow for social experimentation but also provide companies with some structure and accountability toward achieving business outcomes with social content.

Social content plans don't need to be set in stone. In fact, with social media content, it's important for such plans to be adaptable and capable of analytical input and iterative improvements as data increases through growing network participation. A plan will help marketers better evaluate and scale their social media initiatives as well.

2. It's All About You

Blatant self-promotion is the bane of brand social media participation. Companies that view social media platforms simply as a distribution channel fail to create value for the very audiences they're trying to reach.

People don't typically use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogging, Pinterest, and other social applications for keeping tabs on corporate press releases, product announcements, and promotions. Reasons for social media usage are most often personal. According to a Pew Research Center study, "two thirds of social media users say that staying in touch with current friends and family members is a major reason they use these sites." With engaging on personal networks, consumers certainly connect with the brands they like, but contrary to how many brands behave with social content publishing, those connections are part of the social web experience, not the reason for it.

Business marketers can achieve much better success with social content by empathizing with customer needs, interests, goals, and pain points. Seeing things from the customer's point of view will help develop a content and social media approach that serves as a solution or facilitator to creating the kind of social content that resonates, engages, and gets shared. As customer-centric social content gets shared, many of those who engage will refer or become customers. This is a key focus in my book, "Optimize," which is coming out mid-April 2012.

3. To Get, You Must Give

Along with self-promotion, companies have a tendency to expect social communities to behave the way the brand wants them to. The guideline I like to share with companies that want to foster community and engagement is: "Give to get." That doesn't mean, give a sales pitch to get a sale.

Instead, provide something of value before expecting anything in return. In fact, it's smart to find out more specifically what consumers and those who influence them find valuable as inspiration for a social content plan. Deliver useful information, listen to how audiences respond, and make adjustments. Then repeat.

The investment in creating value that is thoughtful for both customers and the brand's business objectives is where consumer and corporate needs are met with social content.

4. Hiding Your Social Content Greatness

A lot of marketing budgets have invested in creating content for companies but many purists feel that great content should be left to attract attention based purely on the quality of the information. There's a feeling that if content is really good, it will attract traffic and engagement all on it's own. That's a naïve perspective, especially in a competitive category and it also makes some strong assumptions about whether there is a preexisting community for the brand, or not.

With a hub and spoke publishing model, themed content is published into a repository that represents a "go to" resource for topics that the brand wants to be known for. At the same time, that content can be promoted through spokes or social channels among communities that are interested. People often rely on content promotion to discover what's new. Promotion can attract traffic, social shares, and links, which can all serve as useful signals to search engines and improve standard and social search engine visibility.

Promotion works best with content that deserves to be shared. That kind of content makes a promise to social networks that it's good. If a brand can consistently create, optimize, socialize, and promote great content, the community will respond with shares, referrals, engagement, links, and even sales.

5. Failure to Analyze Is a Failure to Optimize

Many companies develop social profiles, publish descriptions, and contribute content at various intervals as part of their social media participation. They may even actively optimize social content with search keywords and social topics as a way to empathize with what consumers are looking for and talking about on the social web.

A missing piece of this puzzle is the importance of ongoing monitoring and analysis. There's a process I call, "The cycle of search and social improvement" that involves creating and optimizing social content. As useful content is created and promoted, it gets shared and attracts fans, friends, followers, and subscribers.

As the community grows, even more sharing of links and traffic is involved with brand content. The increase in engagement, search visibility, and social sharing provides a rich set of data with which the brand can improve content creation. It's a cycle of hypothesis, implementation, and analysis that can improve how effectively a brand is able to refine social content effectiveness at inspiring business outcomes.

Are there more "sins of social content"? Without a doubt. But these five are some of the most common. If you can both avoid the bad and pursue the good insights, your social content efforts may see surprising results.

10 All Natural Ways to Stop Feeling Depressed

• Life is a drag.
• What’s the point of anything?
• I’ll never be happy.

Do any of these gloomy thoughts sound familiar? It’s likely they do. The occasional case of the blues is perfectly normal, but that doesn’t make dealing with it any easier. If you allow them to, negative thoughts can fester and lead to serious depression. That’s why it’s important to take action early to bust yourself out of a slump.

While these suggestions won’t eliminate your problems, they can help you break a negative thought pattern and stop feeling depressed. If you think you might have a serious mental health problem, don’t hesitate to see a medical professional.

1. Understand the emotional cycle – Life is an emotional roller coaster. Some days you feel like nothing can stop you. Other days you feel utterly hopeless. Most of the time you’re somewhere in between. Understanding the pattern of positive and negative emotions will help you put your feelings in perspective. Next time you feel down, just remember that it’s a natural emotion that will inevitably pass. Knowing that a feeling of depression is only temporary makes it less dreadful.

2. Spend time with positive people – Nothing affects the way you think and feel more than the people you interact with. Thoughts (both positive and negative) are contagious. If you are surrounded by negative people, it’s only natural that you’ll start to think and feel the same way. To improve your outlook on life, spend time with positive people. Search them out and try to understand the way they see the world. Chances are their happiness will rub off.

3. Reflect on past success – In the wake of a colossal failure, it’s easy to forget everything you’ve ever done right. Take a few minutes to remember your past accomplishments and build yourself up. What made you successful before? What are your strengths? Frequently, this exercise will build self confidence, help you figure out what went wrong, and generate ideas for success in the future.

4. Focus on gratitude – It’s human nature to measure ourselves against those ahead of us on the social ladder. Studies have shown that people care more about being richer than their friends than actually making more money. When you consider everything good in your life and compare it to the problems of less fortunate people, the issue that’s making you depressed won’t seem as serious.

5. Change of scenery – One of the best ways to change the way you feel is to change your environment. When you get in a slump, you start to associate your problems with everything around you. It can get to the point where your environment is a constant reminder of your problems. This can be a dangerous cycle. The solution is to change things. Change doesn’t have to be radical. Cleaning up, adding more lights, or including pleasant decorations can completely change the mood of a room.

6. Break your routine - Going through the same routine, day after day, can be monotonous and depressing. It often leads to getting caught in a rut. To get out of it you need to temporarily change your routine. If you can, take a day off from work. Do something you don’t normally have time for or something you’ve never tried. In the long run, taking a day off every now and then to get out of slump will make you happier and more productive.

7. Interact with animals and nature – It’s funny when you consider how humans put so much importance on their own tiny problems. Animals don’t think this way. A little bird doesn’t mope around because it isn’t an eagle or because another bird beat it to a tasty seed. Animals live in the present moment and they show love unconditionally. Observing and interacting with them will help you get over your problems.

8. Get moving – As Johnny Cash famously suggested, “Get a rhythm, when you get the blues.” Moving to a beat makes everyone feel better. The same is true for movement in general. Hitting the gym or going for a walk will help you shed the lethargy that comes with feeling depressed. The more enthusiastic your moments, the better you will start to feel.

9. Think about the big picture – As Carl Sagan made evident with the Pale Blue Dot, we’re insignificant creatures living in a vast universe on a tiny planet. In the long run, everything we do will probably be forgotten. Some might find this depressing, but it shouldn’t be. It means that all our problems are illusory. In a million years no one will remember what you did or didn’t do. What matters is the present moment and enjoying every second of life that we’re blessed with.

10. Do something to help yourself – Above all, the best way to stop feeling depressed is to take action. What is your biggest problem? How can you alleviate it? Once you decide to stop moping and start moving forward you won’t have time to feel depressed. Action will occupy your mind and give you something to look forward to. Once you get some results, you’ll build momentum and positive thinking will keep getting easier.

How Wipro Learnt The Virtues Of Patience

Image: Namas Bhojani for Forbes India

Vineet Agrawal (in jacket)is President, Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting group

Vineet Agrawal

Designation: President, Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting group

The Challenge: To expand international operations and integrate the $300 million acquisition of Unza which has a strong presence in South East Asian countries like Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and China

How he did it: By deciding early on that he would not have the typical acquirer mindset and make as few changes in Unza as possible, letting Unza retain its character

Arrogance is the biggest hurdle in making acquisitions work. In 2007 we bought Unza for about $300 million, it was Wipro’s second largest acquisition ever. At that time it was the largest international acquisition by an Indian consumer care company. We were buying a company bigger than us (Wipro’s consumer care revenue that time was Rs 600 crore, and we had 1,300-1,400 people. Unza was doing Rs 750 crore and had 4,000-4,500 people in 21 countries.) If it had tanked, it would be difficult for me to get the confidence to acquire another company.

It was a difficult acquisition because we didn’t know the geography, brands, or even product categories. We had never stepped into Malaysia, Singapore, China and Indonesia. That itself made us very careful.

But we were also the acquirers and it’s very natural to have the acquirer mindset; to say, ‘you stand aside and let me show you how to do it’. We had to remember that we bought the company because it was good, and we had to protect that.

You often hear of the 100-day plan for acquisitions, we never have the 100-day plan for any of our acquisitions.

We decided that there were to be zero policy changes. For the first two years we didn’t even change the name; it was continuing as Unza.

For instance, Unza allowed business class travel, which is not our style. We didn’t force fit in our grades; designations were not changed. In Malaysia, a salesman goes in cars and we continue that. Policies relevant to that country still continue; we have not changed it to the Wipro way. There has been some tinkering around, which is to benefit those employees. Like we have a better medical policy in Wipro, so we introduced that.

Before Unza we had acquired North West, a small company (Rs 40 crore turnover) making switches. We thought they would be thrilled to join a large company. But they didn’t feel this way at all. They felt they would be lost in a sea. In North West a salesman had a direct line with the owner of the company, but in Wipro he would have to follow processes. We tried to fit them into a grade structure which we thought was great but they weren’t happy.

So, while we may think we are great because we are a $7 billion company, they were not enamoured.

In Unza, there were other challenges. India was not looked upon as a great country especially in Malaysia, where many Indians were labourers. No one knew Wipro—this was the not the IT business. We were selling bar soaps and they found that decadent—they were selling shower gels and creams. When they came to visit India we were in the mom and pop retail stores, they were in modern retail.

The first thing we wanted was not to lose people, but what we had to do was not clear to us.

Within a month of taking over, we gave Wipro stock options to 70 critical people in Unza and that had a tremendous impact. They had worked with Unza for so long but had not received a bonanza like this. We called the same group in Bangalore to show them Wipro and India. They were given a five-day holiday and our teams took them around to Bangalore, Mysore and Agra.

Of these 70 only about eight people left in the first two years. Many of the core group of people are still with us.

We realised that communication is vital—as the integration starts, rumours can spread fast. For instance, all of us in India carried a Blackberry, but in Unza at that time they didn’t have Blackberries. So every time they saw the flashing red light, they felt we were recording their conversations. It took us four months to figure this out. There is an element of deep mistrust, which can be formed by any small action. There were language barriers—in China, Vietnam, Indonesia only functional heads spoke English. There were no Indians in the system who could vouch for Wipro or India.

So what did we change then?

One of the things we said was how can we help them do the job better? Every country had profitability targets and because of the Wipro name we could get them cheaper working capital loans. We struck deals with suppliers and passed on benefits such as cheaper Microsoft licences. Any savings in costs thus were passed on to the country manager and not to the corporate.

The only thing we insisted upon was faster growth. Unza was running on a 7 percent growth rate; we wanted it to be at 14-15 percent.

We drove that hard and said your growth have to be higher than industry and let us know what we can do to help. Second, we said you have to invest in advertising. They were doing a lot more below-the-line promotions. They were great in modern trade but not so good in general trade. We helped them improve that. We didn’t swamp them with our people—in each country we didn’t have more than two people from Wipro.

If this was India I would have come down hard on the team. Told them this is the number, rework your plan and tell me how you will achieve this. With Unza there was lot of persuasion, nudging them up from 7 to 9 to 11 percent.

It tested my patience.

When I am there I am persuasive, cajoling and supportive. People tell me that just because I am so nice there, I balance by being harsh to them here (laughs).

In India I am a lot more demanding and uncompromising.

But the whole organisation wanted the acquisition to succeed. There was tremendous pride in the team here, and people wanted to be a part of it.
Today we have learnt several things from Unza. We understand modern trade better. We learnt new product categories like deodorants, body lotions and skin care.

We had a seven-year plan with Unza and our numbers (internal rate of return, cash flows, profitability) are all on track.

Two years after we acquired Unza we acquired Yardley. We could have shown our arrogant best to Yardley because they were much smaller, but we didn’t do that. And that is something we learnt from Unza.

We followed the same model with Yardley: The welcoming committee, no change in policies, no change in offices, office timings, etc. We also didn’t move anyone to Wipro, although many people wanted to.

Initially we tried pushing Wipro products to them but what we found was that the Yardley team was happy building the Yardley business. We thought we were doing them a favour by giving them more brands to sell from our stable. Instead of handling a Rs 5 crore turnover, the guy there could handle a Rs 10 crore business. First we felt that it was because of lack of ambition, but realised that Yardley was his passion and we should let it be there.

In Yardley, when we were integrating the companies, every month we would do a review with the liaison team and we would say that don’t get worried if the Yardley team is doing things in a different way, give them some time. We didn’t acquire them for six months or one year, we are not asking for results in six months. We had to pull people back from our liaison team if we felt they were not able to build trust with the other side. 

Read more: http://forbesindia.com/article/my-learnings/how-wipro-learnt-the-virtues-of-patience/32462/0#ixzz1qCa3BuD2

Encrypted Email

What is encrypted email?¶

Encrypted email is a way of keeping the content of your email safe from eavesdropping as it bounces around the internet. The most common type of encryption is OpenPGP (OpenPGP is the specification,PGP is “Pretty Good Privacy” and is proprietary, GPG is GNU Privacy Guard and is free software). There are many resources on the internet that can offer you a detailed explanation of how encryption works. For our purposes, there are three components that are useful to understand: public key,private key and passphrase.

Your public key is, as you can tell from the name, publicly available. Sometimes, people use keyservers to share public keys to make sending emails using encryption easier. Whenever you wish to send encrypted email, you must have the recipient’s public key. Similarly, whenever someone else wants to send you encrypted email, they must have your public key.

A private key is connected to exactly one public key. Without a private key, the content of an encrypted message is extremely difficult to extract. In the age of supercomputers, nothing is impossible, but decrypting a message without the private key is extraordinarily difficult. Your private key is extremely important and should be kept in a safe place at all times.

Your passphrase should be at least 21 characters in length, should contain UPPER and lower case characters, as well as symbols (&$"{@). Your passphrase unlocks your private key and permits it to be used, in conjunction with your public key, to send and receive encrypted email.

How do I use encrypted email?¶

There are three basic functions you can perform using GPG: signing, encrypting and verifying.

Signing: When you sign something, you use your private key and your passphrase to generate asignature block that is appended to the item you are signing. This signature block is generated from two things: (1) a numerical value computed from the contents of the message and (2) your private key.

Verifying: When someone receives something that has been signed, they can verify it using the public key with which it was encrypted. The public key could be downloaded from a keyserver, or perhaps emailed by the sender. Verifying establishes two things —> (1) the message was signed by someone who has access to the associated private key and (2) the contents of the message were not modified in transit.

Encrypting: To encrypt a message, you need the public key of the recipient. You do not need a passphrase or even a gpg key of your own to encrypt something. However, most programs will also encrypt anything to your own public key when sending. Otherwise, once you encrypt a message, you would no longer be able to read it. Once it is encrypted, the contents of the email are no longer viewable in transit. However, the subject, sender, and recipient are still visible.

Can I send and receive encrypted email using riseup’s webmail?¶

One of the webmail programs used on riseup servers allows you to send and receive encrypted email. The software is called IMP and it is the second login available on mail.riseup.net. However, one problem with this software is that your private key is stored on riseup’s servers. This makes it vulnerable to legal process in the United States (such as a search warrant or subpoena) and is therefore not recommended.

It is much better for riseup users who want to use encrypted email to utilize an email client (such as thunderbird) to send and receive email, while keeping your private key stored safely on your local machine.

What are some limitations of encrypted communications?¶

Encrypted communications do not protect you from relational surveillance, which is the monitoring of associations between people. For example, if ihatebush@riseup.net is sending encrypted emails regularly to joehill@riseup.net, someone who was intercepting the communications between the two may not know what the two are discussing, but the basic fact that the two people are regularly communicating is useful in and of itself. Additionally, the subject line of the message is not encrypted.

Signing and verifying do not ensure that the email was in fact sent by the email address associated with the key. Spoofing return email addresses is very easy. Thus, someone with the email address federalagent@yahoo.com could: (1) create a key for joehill@riseup.net, (2) upload the key to a public keyserver and (3) send an email from federalagent@yahoo.com that appears to come from joehill@riseup.net that is signed. If you merely download the public key and verify the message, it will show a “good signature from joehill@riseup.net” even though the message did not come from joehill at all! This is why the web of trust is so important (see below).

How can I verify a key owner’s identity?¶

So you are setup with encrypted email and happily sending and receiving messages. But how do you know that you are actually communicating with the person you think you are? That’s where key fingerprints come into play.

Each public key has a unique fingerprint. The fingerprint is generated through a hash function, which is like a one-way portal. For any specific input, there is one and only one corresponding output. Just like your fingerprints are unique, there is only one fingerprint for any specific public key. Why is this useful? Because in order to be certain of the integrity of the process, you need to make sure that when you are receiving a signed email from joehill@riseup.net you are actually receiving email from your friend Joe Hill. There are two (or possibly three) ways you can accomplish this:

1. You and Joe meet in person and Joe gives you an electronic copy of his public key. 2. You and Joe meet in person and Joe gives you a copy of his key fingerprint and you verify that the fingerprint matches that of the public key. 3. (less secure) If you know Joe very well and recognize his voice, Joe could read the fingerprint to you over the phone.

The fingerprint is not secret information — anyone can generate the fingerprint using the public key.

How can I sign a key and why would I want to?¶

Taking things to the next step, let’s say you’ve exchanged keys with Joe in a secure manner. Now you’re done and can safely email Joe, knowing that you are actually exchanging emails with him (because he is signing his emails), and knowing that the contents of your communication are safe from snooping (because you are encrypting your emails using Joe’s public key). But let’s say Joe meets Rita at an action, and Joe and Rita exchange keys in a secure manner. You know and trust Joe, but you haven’t met Rita. How can you establish that Rita’s key is genuine without having to meet her in person?

Enter the web-of-trust and key signing.

Once Joe has verified Rita’s key in a secure manner, Joe can sign Rita’s public key. There are two schools of thought on key signing – one group believes that you should only sign someone’s key (even someone who you’ve known for a long time) if you have verified that the real name associated with the email address matches that on a government-issued photo identification (such as a passport). Others will sign keys without verifying the key owner’s real name, which establishes that the owner of the email address is the owner of the key, but not that the real name associated with the email address owns the key.

If you trust Joe to carefully verify individuals keys, then you can set in your keyring a level of trust for Joe’s key. Then, if you haven’t met someone in person to verify their keys, but Joe has, you can establish a trust-level for a key based on the fact that Joe has signed it.

You can host a key signing party to encourage your friends and colleagues to exchange keys and sign them. This provides an avenue to verify the identity of people who you have not met where others whom you trust have met the individual.

Do you have any other tips about encrypted email?¶

We’re glad you asked!

• DO save your private key on an encrypted hard disk partition — This protects the integrity of your key in case your computer is lost, stolen, or seized.
• DO NOT share your private key with anyone or save the private key on a public computer.
• USE A STRONG PASSPHRASE – Your passphrase is your last defense against the unauthorized use of your key. Don’t ruin the whole affair by using a weak passphrase. Passphrases should be longer than 21 characters and should not contain words from a dictionary or other easily guessable combinations. A random passphrase that you keep written down in a safe location is better than a long passphrase that includes dictionary words.
• USE GENERIC SUBJECT LINES – Subject lines of emails are not encrypted. Thus, you should always use very generic subject lines in your encrypted communications.
• HOST A SIGNING PARTY – Encourage your friends to get a gpg key and sign each others keys.
• SEND ENCRYPTED EMAILS EVEN WHEN THE CONTENTS ARE NOT IMPORTANT – This is vital!! If the only encrypted email traffic involves secret communications, it creates a much smaller amount of traffic to be analyzed. If everyone used encrypted email for all communications, even for deciding about what kind of pizza to have, this would increase the amount of encrypted email traffic.

How do I setup OpenPGP Encrypted email on my computer?¶

See our Howto section on OpenPGP keys. There is also a section on integrating your keys to useencrypted email in Thunderbird