Quite a Sight !!!


I have read about mythological beings capable of walking on water. May be this is the closest i can get to see one. That guy in the picture is standing on top of what is a river during the warmer days of the year. I watched him dismount from his car, walk on the frozen river for quite a distance, drill a hole in the ice and fish nonchalantly.

Winter View - February 2007. The whole darn river is frozen !!

Lock 7 on the Mohawk River

Summer View- June 2006

Finally the sun showed its face to beam down on us and we ventured out, driving through mountains of snow everywhere.

Winter View (February 2007)


Summer View (July 2006)

I have just finished reading "The Walmart Way" by Don Soderquist, a former Walmart Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer. It is a fairly good book that borders on being an advertorial and talks about the emergence and growth of Walmart and its culture. There are a few questions at the end of each chapter that looks at Walmart and its principles from different angles. Mr.Soderquist very passionately explains the story of a man who had a simple dream of owning a store and ended up creating the world's largest retail empire. It paints a very impressive picture of Walmart, something that may not amuse many people especially those who are trying to survive in a Walmart World. And then there are those who believe that there is a high price to this low cost.
The book does not spend pages discussing the most familiar allegations against Walmart which include Employee health benefits, pay or the closure of thousands of small businesses.
Anyway, this book presents several good lessons and i shall focus on those rather than what it doesn't. The book is divided into twelve chapters and each focusses on a particular facet. To summarise, the book talks about Sam Walton's Vision and how he pursued it, The Walmart culture, its focus on customer delight and how employees make a difference, Its passion for excellence and the drive to check bureaucracy,Its reliance on technology and the reinvention of Supply chain, Its efforts to forge excellent supplier relationships, to be a trend setter in Corporate social responsibility and finally about the future of Walmart.
Although you might become a little tired of hearing Walmart being praised up to the heavens and Sam being regarded a Demi God, i am sure it provides some food for thought.

  

  

 
Made quick trip to the Maple Ski ridge in Schenectady today. 

Freakonomics is an excellent book. It is veritably called "Freakonomics" as it uses tools that economists generally use to investigate problems that do not seem to be in the purview of Economics. The author investigates several topics both intractable and trivial by analysing huge chunks of data to identify patterns. "People may lie but data do not." is Mr Levitt's argument and he proves it conclusively. Some of the topics he has covered in this book are,

1)What makes a perfect parent?
2)What defied the popular belief and contributed to the decline of crime in the 90s?
3)Match fixing among Sumo wrestlers in Japan?
4)Cheating by teachers
5)How sincere can real estate agents be?
6)What brought the Ku Klux Klan down?
7)Why do crack dealers live with their mothers?

Undoubtedly, Mr.Levitt is a maverick and he makes seemingly meaningless piles of numbers tell tales that turn conventional wisdom on its head. What i felt most striking was his reasoning that the decline of crime in the 90s was not due to better policing strategies or a buoyant economy (they may have made a small difference) but the legalization of abortion two decades earlier. It removed a sizeable population of "would be criminals" and crime nose dived.
To summarize, i find this book excellent and insightful and it shows a world seen not just through the eyes of an Economist but that of a criminologist, a sociologist and above all someone who is free from the shackles of convention.