Learning - Dead Companies Walking

Dead Companies Walking: How A Hedge Fund Manager Finds Opportunity in unexpected places by  Jesse Powell and Scott Fearon is a book which will explain you:

1. Shorting and what factors are considered for shorting

2. Importance of Management i.e. bet on the Jockey not the horse

3. Importance of earnings and perils of Debt

4. What not to do in Investing.

Key takeaways from the book is reproduced below:

Six Common Mistakes leaders make

·        They learned from only the recent past.

·        They relied too heavily on a formula for success.

·        They misread or alienated their customers.

·        They fell victim to a mania.

·        They failed to adapt to tectonic shifts in their industries.

·        They were physically or emotionally removed from their companies’ operations.

How to know promoters?

More than anything—more than projections and book values and price-toearnings ratios—Geoff believed human-to-human contact was the best way to gauge a company’s future performance. He valued numbers and raw data, but he knew that numbers were easy to fudge or misread. You had to study the people behind the numbers to get the full story. And reading secondhand profiles about a company’s executives didn’t count. Neither did pressing their flesh an swapping a few jokes with them at an investor conference. You had to go see them where they lived and worked—their own offices.

Best Investment Strategy

Over the years, I’ve found that doing nothing is often the soundest investment strategy.

Mistakes of following top investors

Like a zombie in an old monster movie, Idearc emerged from bankruptcy and came back from the dead in early 2010 as a newly reorganized company called Supermedia (stock symbol: SPMD). Thanks to people’s blind faith in formulas, SPMD was actually one of the hottest stocks on Wall Street for a brief period of time. You read that correctly. In 2010, a company that derived almost all of its revenues from Yellow Pages—Yellow Pages!—was one of the hottest stocks on Wall Street. I’ve still got a list of the firms that owned big interests in Supermedia. It reads like a who’s who of the investment game: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, RBS, J.P. Morgan, Fidelity, GE, Babson, Vanguard—they all owned it. Why? Because if you just looked at the numbers and ignored the minor fact that the company produced a completely outmoded product, then Supermedia was a winner.

On stock trader asking CEO

Bill gates - “People get confused because the stock price doesn’t reflect your financial performance,” he told Fortune magazine after the company’s IPO. “And to have a stock trader call up the chief executive and ask him questions is uneconomic— the ball bearings shouldn’t be asking the driver about the grease.”

Trouble with growth through acquisitions

Growth through acquisitions can be a successful strategy if it is carefully conducted. Airlines, for example, have fairly stable administrative costs, so gaining new routes by buying up competing firms often boosts revenues without adding much more overhead. In many cases, though, growth through acquisitions can be just as dangerous as the kind of expansion-on-steroids that killed off Silk Greenhouse or Value Merchants. While building out and opening a number of new facilities in a short period of time is risky, at least it’s an internally managed endeavor. A business’s existing employees can, in theory, oversee the process and ensure that it’s running smoothly. But integrating a separate business into your own is, by its nature, an outside-in process. For that reason, it’s bound to be a crapshoot. No matter how many lawyers and auditors an acquiring company hires, no matter how much due diligence it performs beforehand, the seller almost always gets a better deal than the buyer. Sellers know where the bodies are buried in their businesses, and there’s usually a good reason why they’re willing to give up ownership.

Mergers and acquisitions are definitely risky methods for growth, but one party always makes a profit on them: the banks who facilitate the deals.

What Central Bank does when rate is cut?

First came the massive injections of taxpayer cash into the financial sector. A lot has been written about that boondoggle, so I won’t go into too much detail on it other than to say that it was the largest and most brazen upward redistribution of wealth in the history of capitalism—and it was only the beginning. Next, the Fed yanked interest rates down to virtually zero. They’re still there as I write this. This move hasn’t gotten the press that the Wall Street bailouts did, but it might have been even more destructive. It punished the prudent to help the profligate. People who had done the right thing and put money into their savings lost out so that poorly managed corporations could refinance what should have been fatal debt loads. Doomed businesses were able to replace high-interest, fast-maturing bond issues with longer-term paper yielding a fraction of what they would have owed otherwise. Congress even sweetened the deal by giving some companies additional five-year tax “look-backs,” which allowed them to recalculate previous returns and claim giant retroactive refunds. It all added up to one big nationwide, taxpayer-subsidized cooking of the corporate books.

About business schools and corporates

Every year I go back to Evanston, Illinois, and give a talk to the students of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, my graduate school alma mater. During a meet-and-greet event there in 2011, I found myself standing next to the new dean of the school and decided it was a perfect opportunity to bring up an idea I’d had on the plane ride out from California. Just a few weeks earlier, Citibank had agreed to pay almost $300 million for knowingly selling its clients toxic subprime mortgage bonds. The year before, Goldman Sachs had paid the largest fine in history, $550 million, for engineering similar deals. “Why don’t you ban Citi and Goldman from recruiting at Kellogg for three years?” I suggested to the new dean. She nearly spit up her drink. “Excuse me?” she asked with a nervous smile. “They blatantly scammed their own clients,” I went on. “They shouldn’t have access to your students.” After a very awkward moment of silence, the dean patted me on the shoulder and stepped away into the crowd. “Nice talking to you, Scott,” she said as she passed me by.

In retrospect, it was probably unfair of me to put the dean on the spot like that. She’d only taken the job a few months earlier. Even if she had liked my idea, I’m sure she wasn’t anxious to take such a radical step so early in her tenure. But the fact remains that Wall Street essentially owns business education now, and it continues to buy off academics and universities by hiring graduates, awarding professors lucrative consulting jobs, and sponsoring seminars. As if to hammer this point home, when I flew back to the Bay Area the day after chatting with the new dean at Kellogg, the top letter on the stack of mail waiting for me in my office was an invitation to “The First Annual Goldman Sachs Global Education Conference” down at Stanford, my undergraduate alma mater.

Book is worth reading for those operating in Stock.

Interesting Tweet

A tweet posted by Makarand Paranjape on Parushuram Jayanti was worth reading:

The moral of the story: those who live by the sword will die by the axe? Excessive & immoral use of violence will be countered, if required, with even greater violence to re-establish dharma.

Migrant Workers Spain or India - Suffer

In India, plight of migrant workers specifically after COVID crisis was very intense and painful.

In a report titled Feeding Europe: Spain's fruit and vegetable workers at forefront of Covid-19 crisis the report takes us to the place where the migrant laborers stay i.e. Atochares Slum , Andalasia, Spain.

One fact is clear, migrant laborers even in Spain, considered to be a developed nation, are living in slums with difficult conditions.

Migrant laborers are not treated well anywhere i.e. Spain or India.

Reporting agency FRANCE 24 correctly summed up:

Spain provides Europe with much of its fruit and vegetables, and demand is on the rise amid the coronavirus crisis. But how is the country meeting this increased demand? In the greenhouses of the Andalusia region, managers are implementing safety measures to protect workers. But in the region of Murcia, where many foreign pickers live in slums, unions say it's a different story out in the fields. Meanwhile, Andalusia also counts more than 100 makeshift camps where thousands of illegal pickers live, unattended to by the health service. Our correspondents report. 

Documentary source: R. Balakrishnan

Learning - The Halo Effect

The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig dissects two famous books which i have read. 

First being In Search of Excellence and other Build to Last.

I was aware that in, In Search of Excellence Tom Peters fudged the data. This was revealed by Tom Peters himself in an interview. Also, Build To Last was also in my good reads list.

My learning from the book is reproduced below:

The desire to feel that we know

Of course, we don’t like to admit how little we know. The social psychologist Eliot Aronson observed that people are not rational beings so much as rationalizing beings. We want explanations. We want the world around us to make sense. We may not know exactly why Lego ran into a brick wall, or why WH Smith fell on hard times, or why Wal-Mart has done so well, but we want to feel that we know what happened. We want the comfort of a plausible explanation, so we say that a company strayed or drifted. Or take the stock market, whose daily fluctuations, edging higher one day and a bit lower the next, resemble Brownian motion, the jittery movement of pollen particles in water or of gas molecules bouncing off one another. It’s not very satisfying to say that today’s stock market movement is explained by random forces.

Feynman and Cargo Cult Science

In the South Seas there is a cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

On Harvard Case studies and Pink Paper Journalism

No doubt Serwer and Burrows are correct. There’s a natural tendency, even at leading publications like Fortune and Business Week, to exaggerate the highs and lows, and to rely on simple phrases to explain a company’s performance. It makes for a better story, yet it leads us down a dangerous path. It’s often said that journalism is the first draft of history, and these journalistic accounts become the primary sources for later studies. The Harvard case study mentioned previously, for example, was based on these same newspaper and magazine articles, and the chapter about Cisco in O’Reilly and Pfeffer’s Hidden Value also cited these same Fortune articles reviewed earlier. These case studies and book chapters are only as good as the sources on which they’re based. But there’s an even deeper problem. The story of Cisco is perhaps less an example of intentional journalistic hyperbole than it is of something more basic: the difficulty we have in understanding company performance, even as it unfolds before us. For all the attention that Cisco received, for all its prominence in the press over several years, even experienced journalists and respected academics had trouble identifying with any precision the reasons for Cisco’s outstanding success or its stunning decline. There was talk, over and over, about customer orientation and leadership and organizational efficiency, but these things are hard to measure objectively, so we tend to make attributions about them based on things we do feel certain about — revenues and profits and share price. We may not really know what leads to high performance, so we reach for simple phrases to make sense of what happened.

On Great Place to work employee survey

We know not to measure employee satisfaction simply by asking employees, “Are you satisfied?” since the answers will likely be colored by the Halo Effect.

Central Idea of the book

The central idea in this book has been that our thinking about business is shaped by a number of delusions. My hope is that managers will read business books a bit more critically, free from delusions, their deepest fantasies and fondest hopes tempered by a bit of realism. I would hope in particular that managers would remember:

·        If independent variables aren’t measured independently, we may find ourselves standing hip-deep in Halos.

·        If the data are full of Halos, it doesn’t matter how much we’ve gathered or how sophisticated our analysis appears to be.

·        Success rarely lasts as long as we’d like — for the most part, long-term success is a delusion based on selection after the fact.

·        Company performance is relative, not absolute. A company can get better and fall further behind at the same time.

·        It may be true that many successful companies bet on long shots, but betting on long shots does not often lead to success.

·        Anyone who claims to have found laws of business physics either understands little about business, or little about physics, or both.

·        Searching for the secrets of success reveals little about the world of business but speaks volumes about the searchers — their aspirations and their desire for certainty.

Once we’ve swept away these delusions, what then? When it comes to managing a company for high performance, a wise manager knows:

·        Any good strategy involves risk. If you think your strategy is foolproof, the fool may well be you.

·        Execution, too, is uncertain — what works in one company with one workforce may have different results elsewhere.

·        Chance often plays a greater role than we think, or than successful managers usually like to admit.

·         The link between inputs and outcomes is tenuous. Bad outcomes don’t always mean that managers made mistakes; and good outcomes don’t always mean they acted brilliantly.

·         But when the die is cast, the best managers act as if chance is irrelevant — persistence and tenacity are everything.

Will all of this guarantee success? Of course not. But I suspect it will improve your chances of success, which is a more sensible goal to pursue. And you won’t find yourself on the shore of a tropical island, wondering why, despite all your earnest efforts to follow the formula of success, the cargo planes still haven’t landed.

The Halo Effect is worth reading.

Unanswered questions; Puzzle for infinity

Dhaka recently executed Capt. Abdul Majed a former Bangladeshi in the context of an political execution.

Key learning / questions from Dhaka episode after reading article titled Sheikh Mujib’s brutal assassin hid in Bengal for 20 years as a teacher, wife had ‘no idea’:

1. How Capt. Abdul Majed managed to hide in Kolkatta for more than a decade?

For more than two decades, Majed/Ali had lived in Kolkata and different districts of West Bengal as a humble, pious teacher, complete with a passport and Aadhaar card confirming his assumed identity.

2. How come such an important personality escaped the so called media for such a long time?

3. Is Capt. Abdul Majed episode is the Osama - Pakistan episode for India?

4. The truth about stay of illegal Bangladeshi's in India / West Bengal stands exposed?

5. The issue of sanctity of Aadhaar card and Passport by Indian authorities?

For more than two decades, Majed/Ali had lived in Kolkata and different districts of West Bengal as a humble, pious teacher, complete with a passport and Aadhaar card confirming his assumed identity.

Sources in central security agencies told ThePrint that Majed had apparently fled Bangladesh in 1996. He later got two passports — one made in 2007, and another in 2017. Both passports and his Aadhaar card were made in his assumed name, Ahmed Ali.

6. The vulnerability of Indian women (widow with children) especially from poor background?

Zareena told ThePrint that she was 31 years old when she was married to Ahmed Ali, then 64. Zareena, an illiterate woman from an impoverished family living in a village in Uluberia, around 55 km from Kolkata, was a widow with a young daughter at the time.

7. Why Kolkatta / Kerala / India has to wake up now regarding illegal immigrants?

8. Why Internal intelligence of India could not report this for such a long period i.e. decades?

9. The tragedy of Indian citizens and their exploitative political leaders?

10. What students might have learned from Capt. Abdul Majed?.

11. Puzzle of exiting Indian shore to neighboring country?

When he was produced before a magistrate’s court, he said he had come to Bangladesh on 15 March by air. But no stamp was found on his passport, sources said.

Capt. Majed / Ali is a classic case study for Indian Authorities.

Time To Build - Andreessen

Marc Andreessen asked a very pertinent question in his article Time To Build, lets build.

Key takeaways from the article is reproduced below:

In the U.S., we don’t even have the ability to get federal bailout money to the people and businesses that need it. Tens of millions of laid off workers and their families, and many millions of small businesses, are in serious trouble *right now*, and we have no direct method to transfer them money without potentially disastrous delays. A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most.

Is the problem money? That seems hard to believe when we have the money to wage endless wars in the Middle East and repeatedly bail out incumbent banks, airlines, and carmakers. The federal government just passed a $2 trillion coronavirus rescue package in two weeks! Is the problem capitalism? I’m with Nicholas Stern when he says that capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know — all of these fields are highly lucrative already and should be prime stomping grounds for capitalist investment, good both for the investor and the customers who are served. Is the problem technical competence? Clearly not, or we wouldn’t have the homes and skyscrapers, schools and hospitals, cars and trains, computers and smartphones, that we already have.

I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you.

Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. Our forefathers and foremothers built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build.

I completely agree with Marc it is time to build.

The article is worth reading and digesting the core truth i.e. its time to build big.

Western Media - Perceptions about India

In a Ask Me Anything in reddit.com, Dhruva Jaishankar has a wonderful answer as to why much of the negative press that India receives in the Western press.

The reply is reproduced below:

However, I do sense a strong bias in favour of certain kinds of stories about India in the Western press, often negative. This is for a few reasons, including: (1) Editors are likely to prefer 'bad news' to 'good news', and that applies universally, not just to India. (2) Quirky stories that reinforce stereotypes are more likely to be published: pollution, monkeys, bovine worship, bureaucratic incompetence, child labour, etc., (3) Many reporters may be nostalgic for an old, gentle India that may never have actually existed and are uncomfortable with the changes they're witnessing in an increasingly aspirational and assertive society, (4) Journalists are people, and everyone prefers talking to those who speak and think like them, which reinforces certain viewpoints when conducting interviews and reflecting Indian opinion about a certain issue, (5) Some relative newcomers among foreign journalists may be unaware of longer term trends and ways in which things have actually improved in India over the last few decades ("oh my god, there is poverty!"), (6) Indian commentators in the Western press reflect particular viewpoints often motivated by their own ideology and personal biases, and editorial boards are either not willing to air or are sometimes simply unaware of alternative viewpoints.

Learning - Modern Monopolies

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy book by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson explains in depth how platforms grew and captured various facets of human interaction with technology.

The book is must read and understanding the subject Platforms ( e.g. Facebook, Amazon etc.).

Few sections reproduced from the book:

What is prices?

This argument actually accounted for reality: Information isn’t perfect and freely available. Markets solve this problem by exposing the sum total of everyone’s private information in the form of prices.

Ronald Coase and why company was created?

Coase’s theory suggested that it was too complicated or costly for a company to search for and find the right worker at the right time for any given task or to search for supplies and negotiate prices. Each of these costs of completing a transaction in the marketplace was a kind of transaction cost. If there were no such costs, any individual could contract any good he or she needed from the market immediately. There would be no reason to form traditional organizations to produce goods or services. Using this idea of transaction costs, Coase created a “theory of the firm” that described how transaction costs shaped the boundaries of organizations in market economies. According to this theory, organizations came into existence in order to minimize the transaction costs and informational deficiencies that resulted from coordinating economic activity through decentralized market exchanges. A company would internalize activities that it could organize more efficiently than the market and externalize those it could not. A company was, in effect, a small, centrally planned economy that operated within a larger market system.

Concept of Economies of Scale

This dynamic led to tremendous economies of scale, a concept made famous by Boston Consulting Group founder Bruce Henderson. Henderson took an idea from military strategy—concentrating mass to overwhelm the enemy—and applied it to business. His observation was fairly simple: The more of something you produce, the better you get at it. But Henderson’s idea of economies of scale and the “experience curve” enabled managers to conceptualize the relationship between size and efficiency.

Challenges of growth

As a result, most large companies facing competitive pressures (i.e., those that were not granted government-sponsored monopolies) cap out at a size well below total control of their respective markets. Beyond a certain point, growth costs more than it’s worth. This fact fits neatly into Hayek’s concept of why markets were effective. On a small scale, you could coordinate economic activity effectively. But if a company grew too big, it wouldn’t be able to collect and react to all the information it needed to make accurate decisions. As a result, costs would rise, and the company would not be able to expand further in a competitive market. The U-shaped economy-of-scale curve that businesses experienced was a demonstration in microcosm of why central planning didn’t work for an entire economy.

When does value chain change

As Coase’s theory suggested, the goal of minimizing transaction costs was what held each component of the value chain together and made them into one coherent whole. If transaction costs changed significantly, value chains could break up or be reorganized in radically different ways.

Key point

Exponential growth starts slow, but as it compounds, it starts to increase rapidly. 

Long term and Noble prize Economist

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically,” Krugman wrote (1998), as it “becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

Jack Ma fighting strategy with eBay

As Ma famously said, “eBay may be a shark in the ocean, but I am a crocodile in the Yangtze River. If we fight in the ocean, we lose—but if we fight in the river, we win.”

It is advised to readers to take deep diving with the authors as they have given lots of practical examples about platforms.

Covid and Supply Chain

Below linked podcast is a must listen to understand the following:

1.  Impact of Defense Production Act (in USA)
2.  Role of one part out of 700 parts used for Ventilator manufacturing
4.  How scaling is achieved by companies like GM and Ford
5.  How mankind works with complete unison to protect fellow mankind

If you feel one more category of people to be added to the Healthcare heroes please add Engineers who have contributed in scaling up of Ventilator manufacturing.

A must hear podcast during COVID times.

Link: The Race To Make Ventilators

Source: Mohnish Pabrai

Action in Speech / Words

I blog very few posts on Cricket. I believed what is performed cannot be spoken / written in words. And if one is truly good in spoken / writing he is a poet or a writer and not a cricketer.

Thanks to Shankar Sharma for recommending a  2015 interview of Michael Holding (legendary fast bowler from West Indies) and Wasim Akram ( legendary fast bowler from Pakistan) by Siddharth Monga.

The subject for discussion was Fast Bowling.

Holding especially is very articulate and accurate in expressing his thoughts. They are worth a thousand kilos of gold.

The interview is a must read. I believe you do not have to read any book on fast bowling, this interview is more than sufficient for any young aspiring fast bowler.

But will they i.e. young aspiring fast bowler understand what they say i don't know.

Leaving aside every thing i suggest this a must read for any cricket lover especially those who have watched the legendary West Indian fast bowling side of 1980's.

This interview should be printed, bounded and passed on as guide on fast bowling to every new comer to the game of cricket.

Few hilarious and knowledgeable golden nuggets from the interview is reproduced below:

On secret of being a fast bowler

Monga: What made you become a fast bowler?

Holding: When I was a kid, we used to play this informal game in Jamaica called Catchy Shubby. You turned up in a park, all kids, you had no umpires, you had no gloves, no pads. Just a matter of who was batting. The only chance you had to bat was by getting that person out. And not by getting him caught, because the person who took the catch would get to bat. You had to hit the stumps. Because there were no umpires they could place their legs in front of the stumps. So we decided if we could hit them on their legs - and that hurts - they wouldn't put their legs in front. That's how I began to bowl fast. I was an offspinner initially.

On intimidation

Holding: Exactly. They say intimidation is not a part of the game. It is. But what people don't understand is, you don't have to bowl bouncers to intimidate. Having the potential is intimidation already. People are aware of it. They are intimidated without you even bowling the bouncer. Obviously you are going to bowl the odd bouncer, but even before you bowl the bouncer the intimidation is there because the potential is there.

On Jeff Thomson

Holding: Dangerous man. He was quick, and you couldn't see the ball with his action. It was out of rhythm. That made things more difficult. Thommo never used to abuse the opposition batsmen. Thommo would bowl a bad ball and he would stand up in the middle of the pitch and kick the ground and call himself names, "Thommo, you such and such, Jeff, you so and so. Thommo, you are a… " I never saw Thommo look at a batsman and abuse the batsman.

On Human body and fast bowling

Holding: Bowling is not natural. Whether you bowl fast or slow. If you give a kid a ball or anything and ask him to get it over to that building, he is not going to bowl it. He is going to throw it. To bowl is unnatural. That's why you need to train your body. That's why you need to be fit and strong. You have to train your body to do something it was not made to do. That's why you have so many bowlers with back problems.Bowling is unnatural but you don't need to be an angry person to bowl fast. You have to have some aggression.

On Run up

Holding: And person to person. Each person is comfortable with a length of the run-up. It's not about the length, it's what you do with the length. What you do when you are running in. No point running in from 100 yards if you flipping trot in. What you have do is: make sure when you get closer to the crease, you are comfortable at your delivery.

Holding: You don't want to be tired by the time you get there. And you also don't want to think, "Oh shit, I am already there."

On Gym training

Holding: One without the other doesn't make sense. You can be strong but you can be unfit even if you are strong, because you need to be running. You can't just stand up at the crease and bowl fast. You have to be able to run to the crease to bowl fast. In the gym, lifting weights is not going to help you do that.

The option

Akram: Imagine a youngster from India or Pakistan, or even the West Indies. He has arrived in the team. The trainer is saying, "You have an option. It's 40 degrees outside. You go for a run. Or you go to the air-conditioned gym." (Holding laughs)What will I pick? Tell me, what will I pick? What will a youngster pick? The fricking air-conditioned gym. That's where they have gone wrong.

Holding: They have become like Atlas. They can lift anything, and tear up a telephone book, but can't bowl properly.

Learning process and damage by computers

Holding: We learned from these guys. Just like today you have these computers telling you where this guy scores his runs, in our day we learned that from experience. We would remember that. It's all memory.

Holding: To be honest, I don't think it helps anybody. All this technology that has come in prevents certain cricketers from thinking for themselves.

Holding: Let me tell you something. The first time they had what we called the spin cam back in the Caribbean, with close-ups and a super slow-mo camera, Australia were there. They filmed Shane Warne. Every delivery. Slowed them down. And they took him to the control room and said to him, "Have a look at this. Do you think this is going to help the batsmen?" Shane Warne said, "No, they still have to play it." You can tell them what is coming, but they still have to play it.

On Test cricket bowling

Holding: That is happening, but you know why? Because of limited-overs cricket. T20 and 50-over cricket. Every ball is so important in the shorter form of the game. You can lose the game in one over. You are not going to lose a Test match in one over. Because you are playing so much limited-overs cricket, they then go into the Test matches thinking something has to happen every ball. You have guys bowling an over with six different deliveries. Absolute rubbish.

Akram: Yes, you have to set batsmen up in Test cricket. That's where you have to be consistent with your line and length. You can't try everything every delivery. Even Anderson in this series, he is one of the top bowlers in the world, but I reckon he tries too many things with the new ball. If he bowls just one kind of swing for two-three overs - say outswing - and then one ball is an inswinger, he will get more wickets. Two outswingers, one inswinger, two outswingers, then another inswinger. You are messing up your line.

On Reverse swing

Holding: Because of the weight. It has all to do with the bias. You are shining one side of the ball, you are putting perspiration, you are putting all sorts of things to maintain the shine, and eventually so much of it soaks into the ball that that side of the ball gets heavy. So the ball is going to drop towards the heavy side. I have said to so many people that it is not a matter of just shine and rough. If I give somebody a brand new ball, and use sandpaper-

On importance of senior member in team

Holding: Important people are the senior people in your team. They know you more than anyone. They will know what is best for you. You stick with the senior people in the team. I wrote an article about Bangladesh years ago. Every time they came to England they would be the youngest ever team. Who do you learn from?

One Interview Many Learnings

Interview of Prof. Brian Green by Faith Sallie was a simple but deeply entrenched in Science and Mathematics.

The interview was too good to miss and i felt the interview should go on forever.

I learned:

Prof. Stephen Hawking :

It seems that there is a Chronology Protection Agency which prevents the appearance of closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians.

Prof. Brian Green:

Science cannot have paradoxes.

Time is so warped that it comes back to its starting point not in space but in time.

Why to watch this interview:

1. To know how to conduct interview.

2. To know how to reply.

3.  Lots of scientific learning for commerce students.