Tuesday, April 20, 2010

First get together of NF @ Nagpur

Post by: Rahul.Bagdia@pManifold.com

The first formal Get Together of Nagpur First took place on Saturday April 17th from 5:30 pm onwards. There were 12 members present during the call including one of founders, Dinesh Jain who participated thru Skype.

It was great to know the details of initiation by so many NF founding members to make time for actively championing the issues of their city and joining hands for finding solution instead of criticizing, blaming and/or passing the buck to the government.

The clear action items laid out for NF reflect the high level thinking and efforts that have gone in formalizing this platform. Now the base foundation being kept, its time for building over it and sustaining it. Best participation would be if we can align the cause identified by NF in our businesses and take responsibility for them.

Let us use this blog thread to discuss the meeting notes for this first get together and more importantly what role WE all (each one of us) could play.

1. There is work going on to make Nagpur as sister city to 3 International cities. It would be great if a clear charter and check list of this could be created and posted on website, so that we localites can start filling the checklist items and then with a full fledge back-end supported project, we approach required agencies. Mr. Dinesh Jain could initiate this white paper and we will all support.

2. Mihan needs a boost from us too. One way suggested was good national/global enterprises can start operating from MIHAN. But what is needed to attract these agencies to MIHAN? I tend to believe that there is huge information gap in this space. There is a need for a serious gap identification in this regard and host a good information portal for MIHAN. Local MBA and Engineering schools talents could be engaged to build this information base, provided it could be monetized.

3. Similar feasibility analysis needs to be done for bringing big projects like Boeing and FedEx @ MIHAN.

pManifold Business Solutions (www.pmanifold.com) can start looking in to support items 2 & 3, if NF can help with linkages to build revenue model for this consulting engagement.

Similarly there were other good ideas like to start an incubation center out of VNIT, starting orange food processing plants and many others. What needs to be done is putting a short description of these projects and build over them to collect more like minded people to get momentum on them. Dinesh put it rightly that NF needs more champions for a cause and we could be doing it collaboratively.

It is good to take a pause and think what stops an IDEA to become REAL. As Dinesh told one gets  limited to pull any big effort all by himself, we all face similar constraints to go out of our own scope of work and our own fear of how much work it might involve and if we could get support. Most time we end up doing merry go round discussions trying to get information or support in the form of linkages and partnerships. May be even putting up a white paper by itself is a daunting task to evade many of us. So how could collaboratively and in an organized fashion, we can achieve results by hitting small milestones spread between many? I don't have an answer, but slowly at pManifold we have started realizing that this type of effort is very much needed and remain common to success of most projects. "Effective Collaboration" is what we need to figure out how to achieve at NF. Regular participation through focused and well organized (in terms of follow-up) blogging will be the first step. Lets make small efforts to share our NF related ideas in this blog in a meaningful way to be used by itself as a repository and credentials of our work together.

Post by: Rahul.Bagdia@pManifold.com

Friday, April 9, 2010

Vidharbha State

A couple of email chains last few weeks made me curious. Specially the one where it was reported that Sangli got a better deal over Nagpur for maintaining its Tigers. Ye, I did not even know Sangli had Tigers!

Anyhow, the question worth pondering over is, whether a separate Vidharbha is a solution for these kind of issues.

Is it about time?

You can vote on the left rail of this blog. There are three choices.

Please add your comments below this post if you have any ideas/thoughts/opinion on this issue.