what do you think?

#1 - Imagining India - A must read book by 'Nandan Nelakani'

Whenever I visit Chennai, my favorite shop to hangout is Landmark (a book store) to browse latest books, music cd's, and dvd's. During my recent visit to India, I went to Landmark book store to review the book 'Imagining India' by Nandan Nelakeni. It didn't take me too long to realize that this is a must to have in my personal library.

I read most of the book, it was well researched and written on socio-economic changes since the India's independence. Nandan Nelakeni's ideas and analysis on many economic topics, political compositions, and current-future path to the India's growth is simply amazing. There are many great Indian authors wrote books on India's socio-political-economic progress for the past half-a-century, but somehow I felt Nandan has a great analysis and good insights than many other authors (limit this statement to my opinion).

If you want to know about India's progress for the last 50 years, this is one of the books you must read.

#2 - Battery Park, NY - what a street entertainment group (bunch of kids) can show you what selling is all about?

Recently, I took my parents to NYC for a visit, one of the plan was to take them to 'Statue of Liberty' in a ferry from Battery park. While my parents visiting a statue of liberty, I have decided to stay back in the park to take some break after a long drive from Rochester,NY

I was lying on a bench in the park; a small group of young kids arrived to the park and started to gather a crowd while performing some comedy and dance. Since they arrived to the park, I was keenly observing them as how are they going to attract the crowd? A leader of the entertainment group stood on a bench and whistled loudly to the crowd just getting-off the boat, while the other member of the entertainment group cracking jokes loudly while creating some interest to the crowd. While they see crowd slowly moving towards them, one-by-one started performing dance, show-talk, and throwing jokes on the crowd. After 10 minutes, I could see the crowd was about 250-300 people. The performance was about 30 minutes and was able to earn easily over $200 for the show (i guess the whole show was at about 45 minutes)

Then the crowd was dispersed and the performance group (kids) took a break for about 10 minutes before another ferryboat arrives. The group started to gather a crowd again. The sequence was exact same, perfected the script, the leader was very energetic and ease in engaging the crowd. To my surprise, another set of a crowd of over 200 people in just another 45 minutes from the last show. It was AMAZING.

To my observation, the formula for success was simple, perfected script, excellent team work, energy, and their passion for the crowd, that's it. I am sure if those kids get some education, they would be a killer sales team.

I am sure we all can take learning out of the story. We work in either sales or service organizations; our success depends on our teamwork, passion, practice, and knowledge.

- Sameer Penakalapati