Harsha Bhogle...

impresses me every single time I listen to, watch, or read him.

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Doing things without result in mind often leads to something big: Bhogle


13 Mar 2009, 0553 hrs IST, Vinod Mahanta and Krishna Gopalan, ET Bureau

Chatting up with Harsha Bhogle on management matters throws up multiple talk points - from cricket to management, Hyderabad to marketing, and some Harsha Bhogle

deep philosophy . With him around, talk is never at a discount. Harsha comes hand in gloves, ready for the drive, prepared to take on any dialogue. But that can only be expected of an ace commentator whom the cricket world admires, and fans adore.

Blame the pedantic streak on his academic background , since both his parents are professors. But it is his out-of-the-box jive and a 360-degree command over the game that has won him hearts, recently getting him voted as Cricinfo’s favourite TV cricket commentator. “I have found that if you do things without results in mind, it often leads to something big,” he says.

Always expect the unexpected from this IIM-A grad. His corporate presentation skills remain on par with his gift of the gab. After calling it a day at P&G in 1990, which was preceded by a stint at Rediffusion, Harsha changed tracks. He knew his calling all along - a life veering around the contest between bat and ball. So he hung up his management boots and hopped onto the cricket bandwagon. “I didn’t have great expectations.

I didn’t have great needs either and I was never in love with money,” he says. “Keeping expectations low is the biggest challenge in life. If your expectations are high, you are doing it for the results. In effect, you put undue pressure on yourself to achieve.”

The 48-year-old commentator played for his university and started out bowling leg breaks before turning into a batsman who could bowl. He feels the pulse of the game he comments upon now with the same passion he demonstrated on the field decades ago. “But I’m not a frustrated cricketer. Cricket is not only about technique. It is about emotions. The emotions of losing, winning, trying,” he says.

What has worked for Bhogle has been his outsider status, something that has endowed him with a unique perspective : a journalist with an Harsha Bhogle

advertising background, a noncricketer in broadcasting, a commentator turned corporate speaker, a cricket functionary who actually understands the logic behind the Duckworth-Lewis method.

Take a closer look at his various avatars - commentator, emcee, author, cricket advisor to the Indian Premier League’s Mumbai Indians, quizmaster, journalist. Scrutiny shows a set of smart diversifications in one core area: communications . For Harsha Inc, each one of his avatars is a revenue stream. Today, he wears his many hats with panache, marrying sports and management, dishing out liberal doses of customized corporate wisdom with a mix of sports and management.

It’s a perfect partnership at Prosearch Consultants, a firm he runs with his wife, Anita, a classmate from IIM-A . She generates the management content (80% of the work) while Harsha brings in his sports analogies (20% of the work, by his own admission). He, of course, gets to present it all. For an out-of-form FMCG company, Bhogle Inc conjures up this connect - “great teams have small dips, but they come back stronger.” According to him, winning can indeed get burdensome.

“If you are winning all the time, you start playing against yourself. If Sachin Tendulkar averages 45, it’s a bad series. If Yuvraj Singh averages 44, it’s a good series. So Tendulkar is condemned to be compared with himself all the time. Great companies carry the burden of great performance year upon year.”

Of course, Harsha makes no pretensions when it comes to his favourite cricketer. Sachin Tendulkar is not just good but “great” because “he is still in love with the game and never allows the periphery matters to dominate it. Harsha admiringly wrote in one of his columns, “ the master of the game thinks he is the servant of the game.”

The pitch now turns to the condensed and entertaining Twenty20 version of the gentleman’s game, and Harsha suddenly becomes a marketing maven. “It’s a case of product positioning and filling a market gap in the product portfolio ,” he says. He elaborates on how Twenty20 came into being, threatened by the English Premier League football.

“Test match cricket, on the contrary, will remain a connoisseur’s sport and the one-day format will be television’s growth engine. T20 will be the messiah of cricket and the future of the game.” That said, as Harsha draws a deep breath and says his dream is to “become the best cricket writer in India .” And what’s his mantra? “It’s not your job to listen to me. Rather, it’s my privilege that you are listening to me.”


13 Mar 2009, 0553 hrs IST, Vinod Mahanta and Krishna Gopalan, ET Bureau

Interesting Article on FT

Complexity

Published: March 16 2009 09:12 | Last updated: March 16 2009 16:07

High up peoples’ list of culprits for the credit crunch is complexity. The accusation? That certain financial products were incomprehensible to all but a tiny few. Buyers and sellers, therefore, had no idea what they were trading. Executives devised entire strategies on businesses they did not understand. Regulators and ratings agencies flapped about in the dark.

The solution is to make things simpler, right? Wrong. For that supposes humans are opposed to complexity when in fact they create it whenever possible. Many sociologists see the process of making the simple complicated as one method social groups employ to help identify themselves. Linguists sometimes refer to “esoterogeny” where speakers add verbal tricks in order to make their language harder for outsiders to understand and to foster inclusiveness.

So why do it in finance or any other industry? By making what they do incomprehensible to everyone, bankers, management consultants, plumbers and academics protect their franchise, and therefore their earnings. Adding complexity is doubly important in industries where nothing physical is created. It is no surprise, therefore, that those earning the most money ended up in jobs that none else could understand.

That makes a policy response pointless. If regulators tried to simplify asset backed securities, their complexity would simply take another form. Banks cannot have anyone off the street applying to trade derivatives (although research shows that random punters would be just as profitable). And dumbing down the entire banking industry would just result in a complexity bubble (and higher wages) emerging somewhere else.

Now that governments around the world have all the power – with workers from the private sector clambering to get on board – it is a fair bet that public offices will be next to pile on the gibberish. After all, bureaucracy in all its numbing detail is simply another form of complexity designed to keep a frustrated public at bay.