KACHARAGADLA

In a low-slung office building at his giant ceramics factory in southwestern Nigeria, Sun Jian insisted that we have tea. He had just returned from a trip to China, and he had a batch of top-quality tea he wanted to share with visitors, in an age-old gesture of Chinese hospitality. Sun is from Wenzhou, a midsize city in southeastern China. Nearly 4,000 years ago the lustrous, pale green glaze called celadon was invented in Wenzhou, which became the birthplace of Chinese ceramics. In the 1970s, however, times there were tough. After elementary school, Sun dropped out and started working. In 1978, two years after Mao Zedong’s death, Wenzhou was the first city in China to establish private enterprises. Sun worked his way up through several leather-processing factories and eventually saved enough to start his own leather manufacturing business. But by the late 2000s costs were climbing at an alarming pace, and he knew he needed to move out of China. A friend suggested he think abou

Like most CEOs in growing companies, one of my chief concerns has always been talent. I thought about all parts of the employee lifecycle. I obsess about finding great people, making them successful, developing their skills, and retaining them for the long haul.  Research has long shown  that more diverse teams produce better business results. Outside of work, I started to notice something as I entered my 40s – female friends and colleagues were leaving their careers for a period of time to focus on their children and finding it difficult to restart their careers. Their attempts were thwarted by bias from recruiters and hiring managers who were reluctant to consider a candidate with a career gap or someone who wanted something less than a full-time role. So we decided to launch an experiment at Return Path. Our CTO and human resources leaders convinced me that we could find success by building a new kind of internship program aimed specifically at women looking to restart their

Machines can now beat humans at complex tasks that seem tailored to the strengths of the human mind, including poker, the game of Go, and visual recognition. Yet for many high-stakes decisions that are natural candidates for automated reasoning, like doctors diagnosing patients and judges setting bail, experts often favor experience and intuition over data and statistics. This reluctance to adopt formal statistical methods makes sense: Machine learning systems are difficult to design, apply, and understand. But eschewing advances in artificial intelligence can be costly. Recognizing the real-world constraints that managers and engineers face, we developed a  simple three-step procedure  for creating rubrics that improve yes-or-no decisions. These rubrics can help judges decide whom to detain, tax auditors whom to scrutinize, and hiring managers whom to interview. Our approach offers practitioners the performance of state-of-the-art machine learning while stripping away needless c

For managers and marketers alike, the power to calculate what customers might be worth is alluring. That’s what makes  customer lifetime value  (CLV) so popular in so many industries. CLV brings both quantitative rigor and long-term perspective to customer acquisition and relationships. “Rather than thinking about how you can acquire a lot of customers and how cheaply you can do so,” one marketing guide  observes , “CLV helps you think about how to optimize your acquisition spending for maximum value rather than minimum cost.” By imposing  economic discipline , ruthlessly prioritizing segmentation, retention, and monetization, the metric assures  future customer profitability  is top of mind. For all its impressive strengths, however, CLV suffers from a crippling flaw that blurs its declared focus. The problem is far more insidious than those  articulated  in venture capitalist Bill Gurley’s thoughtful CLV vivisection. In fact, it subverts how customers truly become more valu

In line with its growth strategy, Hyderabad-based Creative Print & Pack recently invested in a remarketed Heidelberg Speedmaster CD 102 six-color press with coating unit.   “Heidelberg is a trusted brand and the CD 102 is a synergistic fit into our business objectives,” states Kondaiah Chowdary, the man who runs the show at Creative Print & Pack - which specializes in design, commercial printing, packaging, paper carry bag manufacturing and, innovative and specialty packaging. From a modest startup that once outsourced printing jobs, Creative Print & Pack has taken giant strides forward today as an ISO 9001: 2008 certified company with a prestigious clientele that includes Van Heusen, Louis Philippe, Levi’s, & Ray Ban among other upscale brands. A preset plus feeder supports maximum substrate flexibility, assisting the Speedmaster CD 102 in handling a wide array of substrates from 0.03 millimeter paper to 1 mm thick cardboard. The AutoPlate feature facilitat

State officials had worked patiently for over a year to make this happen South Korea’s second largest carmaker,  Kia   Motors, will end its five-year evaluation on India entry when the company signs a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the   Andhra Pradesh   (AP) government later this month for setting up a factory. State officials had worked patiently for over a year to make this happen. Kia and the AP government have moved swiftly on the follow-up action after a final decision was taken. The state government had issued orders for acquisition of 600 acres for the proposed manufacturing hub just a day after Kia’s team met chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu on April 12. The government proceeded with the acquisition only after Kia officials were satisfied with the site, after making two-three visits to Penukonda in Anantapur district, sources said.  The site is located on national highway around 120 km from Bengaluru. Senior officials of the Andhra industries depar

Samsung Electronics today launched its flagship smartphones Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ in India, opening up infinite possibilities for the future with a new level of design, functionality and user convenience. The smartphones redefine the future of style and consumer experience with a stunning bezel-less dual-edge Infinity Display that provides a truly cinematic viewing experience. They also come with Samsung Pay, the mobile payment service with defense-grade security, the best low-light camera and a personal assistant, Bixby. Galaxy S8 builds on Samsung’s heritage of creating stunning designs and meaningful innovations that transform people’s lives. The Infinity Display and bezel-less design give you 18% more screen and form a smooth, continuous surface with no buttons or harsh angles, making multi-tasking more convenient with the 5.8-inch Galaxy S8 and 6.2-inch Galaxy S8+. The physical home key on the front has given way to a more intuitive soft key with a pressure sensor tha