Customer centricity is a word bandied around the most across conference rooms and in business discussions. Yet most debates in boardrooms focus on either product centricity (what are the strengths of our product and how do we make it relevant to consumers?) or competition centricity (how can we make our product look and feel better than the competition?).

Madhukar Sabnavis: The ecosystem of a product

Business Standard

In a hard-hitting article, Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil has detailed some of the more egregious &ldquo;lapses&rdquo; by Lehman&rsquo;s auditors, E&amp;Y, which were uncovered by the examiner investigating the investment bank&rsquo;s collapse.

Jamal Mecklai: Shades of Enron

Patricia Cornwell created her heroine, the ash-blonde forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, in 1990, with Postmortem, long before we became immune to the gruesome sights of a police morgue from watching CSI (Miami, New York, and no doubt Patna one of these days).

Flesh and bone

Air India has very often been slammed for living off taxpayers&rsquo; money &mdash; an impression that was patently wrong till a couple of months ago when the first tranche of Rs 800 crore was given to the airline as additional equity by the government, in its capacity as the airline&rsquo;s owner. Contrary to popular belief, in the last 57 years, Air India and erstwhile Indian Airlines have jointly received no more than Rs 500 crore from government.

Jitender Bhargava: The cost of being a PSU

Why the Israel-Palestine peace process is not likely to go anywhere.

Left brain-right brain

Nobody had really stayed in our house in Santiniketan before I relocated here from Mumbai. It was a holiday home for family and friends. For the time when we chose not to holiday or probably contribute towards its upkeep, my parents would rent out a portion of the house in order to keep it from wearing a desolate look.

Keya Sarkar: Caretaker tenant

By most standards, I wake early enough, but I&rsquo;ve always enjoyed my mornings somewhat selfishly while the household takes care of itself. Someone provides a pot of tea; there are newspapers to be glanced through; books to be read; perhaps a little light music to listen to; a leisurely breakfast to be had. And so this wonderful world might have continued undisturbed if both servants, through force of circumstance, hadn&rsquo;t taken off together, leaving us, said my wife cheerfully, a little &ldquo;family time for a few weeks&rdquo;.

Kishore Singh: Maid in heaven

The debate on food security is remarkable for its focus on the desired objective, while ignoring the question of effective delivery. The Congress leadership and many activists are in favour of a maximalist food security law that promises 35 kg of grain per family every month, at the subsidised price of Rs 3/kg. The government, more cautiously, proposes to restrict the quantity to 25 kg per family.

T N Ninan: Intent vs delivery

The replacement of indigenous systems of justice by the colonial British system of jurisprudence radically reshaped the structure of property and other rights in the country. The implications of this implant in the legal landscape continue to be explored in a large literature by historians and economists.

Indira Rajaraman: The Supply of Justice

A tourist visa to Pakistan, priced at Rs 15, roughly the same as a local bus or Metro ticket in Delhi, sounds like a deliciously tempting bargain but getting there, at this twisted juncture in India-Pakistan relations, is not a joy ride. There is only once-a-week PIA connection between Delhi and Karachi.

Sunil Sethi: Can Karachi get a new start?

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is not widely known in India. A Frenchmen of Jewish origin, his fame rests on his novel Remembrance of Things Past. It is considered, after Tolstoy&rsquo;s War and Peace, the second greatest work of fiction in the western world.

K Natwar Singh: The overcrowded PMO

Kabir Suman, poet, singer and one-man band (but without a guitar in hand), was walking towards Parliament, preparing to sign the papers that would make him a representative of the people in the Lok Sabha.

Aditi Phadnis: How many roads will he travel?

It&rsquo;s not just the world&rsquo;s single largest wine fair (4,200 exhibitors spread over one square kilometre of covered space; 150,000 visitors over five days). It&rsquo;s a celebration of la dolce vita italiana, with 4,000 wine labels, 5,000 different olive oils, 1,000 balsamic vinegars, Italian meats and cheeses to die for, and the best wine-making machinery in the world.

Camping in Vinitaly

Unrecognised private schools, which cater to the poor in slums and villages of India, have been under threat for a long time. With the passage of the Right to Education Act, the threat is real. The new law specifically calls for these schools to be closed or recognised within three years. In 2008, the Delhi High Court had also wanted to close roughly 10,000 such schools in the national capital. The reason why budget schools do not get recognition is because they do not meet standards. They, for example, do not have a playground of a certain size or they cannot pay the minimum salary for a government school&rsquo;s teacher, which is over Rs 20,000 a month after the Sixth Pay Commission. To pay such a salary or to have such a playground, they would have to quadruple their fee, and the poor would no longer be able to afford it.

Gurcharan Das: Grade budget schools

Physics, to borrow a phrase from Rumsfeld has &ldquo;known unknowns&rdquo; as well as &ldquo;unknown unknowns&rdquo;. Established theories like the Standard Model predict the existence of undiscovered particles like the Higgs Boson. There is also the dark matter problem &mdash; a major discrepancy between the amount of matter that should be in the universe and what has been observed.

Back with a bang

Realism is not always a superior mode of artistic expression.

Realism? Really?

Individuals following this approach need to be more disciplined, optimistic and need some serious luck.

Investing like PE firms

Recent events provide an opportunity to renew our commitment to reduce the gender gap in human development and compel us to reflect on a strategy for women&rsquo;s empowerment. A comprehensive gender policy has yielded visible improvements in schools, higher education enrolment and space in local governance. We can also clearly see multiple voices emerging on gender issue particularly since the early 1990s. These voices are closely linked to the uneven gains of progress recorded by various groups. &ldquo;Women&rdquo; in India are is a homogeneous category &mdash; it is marked with differences in attainment and poor performance particularly in the case of women belonging to certain categories such as scheduled caste (SC), scheduled tribe (ST) and Muslims. The visible variation in human development and causes thereof among the women of different social belonging have induced increased demand for group-specific gender policies.

Sukhadeo Thorat & Nidhi Sadana Sabharwal: Coping with multiple gender disparities

The US Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, is off to India to launch the new bilateral economic dialogue focused on macroeconomic stability, financial markets and infrastructure financing. Geithner has a long association with India where he spent some of his childhood in the 1980s as the son of a Ford Foundation officer. This trip will have three objectives.

Arvind Subramanian: What Geithner should and should not do

The past two years have been difficult for governments and central banks all over the world. Excessive credit expansion and asset price inflation, fuelled by so-called &ldquo;financial innovations&rdquo; of dubious value, and a lax regulatory environment led to an accumulation of risk that was not adequately understood and ultimately produced a severe crisis.

'RBI deserves credit for foreseeing dangers of property bubbles'

The movement started by Medha Patkar to oppose the Sardar Sarovar Project is raising its pitch as the government okays construction of the last phase of the dam over the Narmada.

Sreelatha Menon: Unquiet flows the Narmada

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