Ian Chappell wants aggressive Virat Kohli to replace defensive MS Dhoni

New Delhi:  Former Australian skipper Ian Chappell feels Virat Kohli should replace Mahendra Singh Dhoni as India's Test captain as the incumbent is defensive and lets the game "meander along like an absent-minded professor strolling in the park".

Writing in a column for 'ESPNCricinfo', Chappell argued for Kohli's elevation as soon as possible after India's shambolic recent tour of New Zealand in which the team failed to register a single win in any format. 

"Dhoni is a brilliant captain in the shorter versions of the game, and a master at timing his run to the finishing line as a middle-order batsman. However, as a Test captain he's too reactive and has a tendency to let the game meander along, like an absent-minded professor strolling in the park," Chappell wrote.

"His conservatism allows the better players among opposition batsmen too much freedom and too many easy runs. Consequently, big partnerships, like the match-saving one by Brendon McCullum and BJ Watling, build too often," he said referring to the drawn second Test in New Zealand which India seemed like wining inside three days at one stage.

"Dhoni really should have been replaced as Test captain following India's disastrous tours of England and Australia in 2011-12, when his teams displayed little fight in losing eight matches on the trot."

Chappell said Dhoni seems to lack ideas when the team flounders. "When a captain starts to hinder his team, he needs to be replaced. During that horror patch, Dhoni was unable to inspire his team and looked like a skipper just going through the motions. There's no doubt that a captain -- even the best of them -- can stay on too long, to the point where he loses his team," he explained.

"Dhoni did bounce back when he orchestrated a convincing whitewash of Australia at home. There's no question he's a better captain under familiar conditions. He's at his best with spinners operating regularly, whereas when conditions are more in tune with seamers he struggles." 

"In fairness to the selectors, not replacing Dhoni following the disaster in Australia was understandable, as a number of senior players retired and the alternatives were few," Chappell said.

Chappell said Kohli has the aggression which is needed to fire up a team in trying circumstances.

"A suitable alternative is now available in Virat Kohli. He has leadership experience as captain of Indian youth teams and, more importantly, he's now the right age and has matured into a top-class batsman. Even more importantly, he has shown his mettle overseas by scoring runs in difficult arenas like the WACA and the Bullring," he said.

"This is the sort of inspiration India need to boost their overseas record. However, what they need even more is a proactive captain who can get the best out of his bowlers when playing in unfamiliar conditions," he added.

"Kohli is an aggressive batsman but that doesn't automatically mean he'll captain in the same manner. Ricky Ponting was an aggressive strokemaker nicknamed "Punter", but as captain he didn't take his gambling instincts on to the field."

Chappell said once given the job, Kohli will have to show a lot of courage in decision-making.

"Kohli needs to be brave as an India captain. Instead of placing defensive fields for Ishant Sharma's wayward deliveries he has to challenge him by deploying men designed to aid the bowler, as long as he maintains line and length. If Ishant can't oblige him, he has to find another bowler who can.

"While Dhoni's tendency to rely on batsmen making mistakes and getting themselves out works brilliantly in the shorter forms of the game, the ploy is often exposed as flawed when gritty opponents like McCullum mount a counterattack in Test matches," he said.

"Dhoni's latest injury may be fortuitous. It gives the selectors a chance to evaluate Kohli's leadership credentials in the one-day arena, and if he's successful, they should appoint him Test captain," he added.

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Indian team leaves for Asia Cup in Bangladesh

India's campaign will start with a clash against hosts Bangladesh on February 25. In MS Dhoni's absence, Virat Kohli will lead the team.

Mumbai:  The Indian cricket squad, led by Virat Kohli in the absence of injured regular skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni, departed here today for the Asia Cup competition in Bangladesh starting on February 25.

Dhoni has been ruled out of the tournament after the wicketkeeper-batsman sustained a Grade I left side-strain injury during the course of the second Test against New Zealand earlier this month.

The Kohli-led team would commence its campaign to regain the trophy, that India won for the fifth and last time in 2010 in Sri Lanka, with a round robin game against hosts Bangladesh on February 26.

The remaining round robin fixtures for India are scheduled on February 28 (v Sri Lanka), March 2 (v defending champions Pakistan) and March 5 (v Afghanistan).

The final of the tournament is scheduled on March 8.

India squad: Virat Kohli  (Capt.), Shikhar Dhawan, Rohit Sharma, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ambati Rayudu, Ajinkya Rahane, Dinesh Karthik, Ravindra Jadeja, R Ashwin, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Mohammed Shami, Varun Aaron, Stuart Binny, Amit Mishra and Ishwar Pandey.

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Fine-tuning has limits; it's time to create

When Microsoft tapped Satya Nadella as its third chief executive, the technology giant turned to a longtime engineering executive and company insider. He takes over at a critical time, as Microsoft grapples with both strategic and cultural challenges. In his first interview as CEO, Nadella, just weeks into his job, talks about leadership lessons from his predecessors, his management style and fostering innovation. This interview has been edited and condensed. 

Q: What leadership lessons have you learned from your predecessor, Steve Ballmer? 

A: The most important one I learned from Steve happened two or three annual reviews ago. I sat down with him, and I remember asking him: "What do you think? How am I doing?" Then he said: "Look, you will know it, I will know it, and it will be in the air. So you don't have to ask me, 'How am I doing?' At your level, it's going to be fairly implicit." 

I went on to ask him, "How do I compare to the people who had my role before me?" And Steve said: "Who cares? The context is so different. The only thing that matters to me is what you do with the cards you've been dealt now. I want you to stay focused on that, versus trying to do this comparative benchmark." The lesson was that you have to stay grounded, and to be brutally honest with yourself on where you stand. 

Q: And what about Bill Gates? 

A: Bill is the most analytically rigorous person. He's always very well prepared, and in the first five seconds of a meeting he'll find some logical flaw in something I've shown him. I'll wonder, how can it be that I pour in all this energy and still I didn't see something? In the beginning, I used to say, "I'm really intimidated by him." But he's actually quite grounded. You can push back on him. He'll argue with you vigorously for a couple of minutes, and then he'll be the first person to say, "Oh, you're right." Both Bill and Steve share this. They pressure-test you. They test your conviction. 

Q: There's a lot of curiosity around what kind of role Bill is going to play with you. 

A: The outside world looks at it and says, "Whoa, this is some new thing." But we've worked closely for about nine years now. So I'm very comfortable with this, and I asked for a real allocation of his time. He is in fact making some pretty hard trade-offs to say, "OK, I'll put more energy into this." And one of the fantastic things that only Bill can do inside this campus is to get everybody energized to bring their A-game. It's just a gift. 

Q: What were some early leadership lessons for you? 

A: I played on my school's cricket team, and there was one incident that just was very stunning to me. I was a bowler - like a pitcher in baseball - and I was throwing very ordinary stuff one day. So the captain took over from me and got the team a breakthrough, and then he let me take over again. 

I never asked him why he did that, but my impression is that he knew he would destroy my confidence if he didn't put me back in. And I went on to take a lot more wickets after that. It was a subtle, important leadership lesson about when to intervene and when to build the confidence of the team. I think that is perhaps the No. 1 thing that leaders have to do: to bolster the confidence of the people you're leading. 

Q: Tell me about your management approach in your new role. 

A: The thing I'm most focused on today is, how am I maximizing the effectiveness of the leadership team, and what am I doing to nurture it? A lot of people on the team were my peers, and I worked for some of them in the past. The framing for me is all about getting people to commit and engage in an authentic way, and for us to feel that energy as a team. 

I'm not evaluating them on what they say individually. None of them would be on this team if they didn't have some fantastic attributes. I'm only evaluating us collectively as a team. Are we able to authentically communicate, and are we able to build on each person's capabilities to the benefit of our organization? 

Q: Your company has acknowledged that it needs to create much more of a unified "one Microsoft" culture. How are you going to do that? 

A: One thing we've talked a lot about, even in the first leadership meeting, was, what's the purpose of our leadership team? The framework we came up with is the notion that our purpose is to bring clarity, alignment and intensity. What is it that we want to get done? Are we aligned in order to be able to get it done? And are we pursuing that with intensity? That's really the job. 

Culturally, I think we have operated as if we had the formula figured out, and it was all about optimizing, in its various constituent parts, the formula. Now it is about discovering the new formula. So the question is: How do we take the intellectual capital of 130,000 people and innovate where none of the category definitions of the past will matter? Any organizational structure you have today is irrelevant because no competition or innovation is going to respect those boundaries. Everything now is going to have to be much more compressed in terms of both cycle times and response times. 

So how do you create that self-organizing capability to drive innovation and be focused? And the high-tech business is perhaps one of the toughest ones, because something can be a real failure until it's not. It's just an absolute dud until it's a hit. So you have to be able to sense those early indicators of success, and the leadership has to really lean in and not let things die on the vine. When you have a $70 billion business, something that's $1 million can feel irrelevant. But that $1 million business might be the most relevant thing we are doing. 

To me, that is perhaps the big culture change - recognizing innovation and fostering its growth. It's not going to come because of an org chart or the organizational boundaries. Most people have a very strong sense of organizational ownership, but I think what people have to own is an innovation agenda, and everything is shared in terms of the implementation. 

Q: How do you hire? 

A: I do a kind of 360 review. I will ask the individual to tell me what their manager would say about them, what their peers would say about them, what their direct reports would say about them, and in some cases what their customers or partners may say about them. That particular line of questioning leads into fantastic threads, and I've found that to be a great one for understanding their self-awareness. 

I also ask: What are you most proud of? Tell me where you feel you've set some standard, and you look back on it and say, "Wow, I really did that." And then, what's the thing that you regret the most, where you felt like you didn't do your best work? How do you reflect on it? 

Those two lines of questioning help me a lot in terms of being able to figure people out. I fundamentally believe that if you are not self-aware, you're not learning. And if you're not learning, you're not going to do useful things in the future. 

Q: What might somebody say in a meeting that, to you, sounds like nails on a chalkboard? 

A: One of the things that drives me crazy is anyone who comes in from the outside and says, "This is how we used to do it." Or if somebody who's been here for a while says, "This is how we do it." Both of them are such dangerous traps. The question is: How do you take all of that valuable experience and apply it to the current context and raise standards? 

Q: Any final big-picture thoughts on how you're going to approach your new role? 

A: Longevity in this business is about being able to reinvent yourself or invent the future. In our case, given 39 years of success, it's more about reinvention. We've had great successes, but our future is not about our past success. It's going to be about whether we will invent things that are really going to drive our future. 

One of the things that I'm fascinated about generally is the rise and fall of everything, from civilizations to families to companies. We all know the mortality of companies is less than human beings. There are very few examples of even 100-year-old companies. For us to be a 100-year-old company where people find deep meaning at work, that's the quest.

© 2014, The New York Times News Service

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28 members of Kerala Strikers asked to leave plane for allegedly misbehaving with crew

Cochin:  A team of celebrity cricketers, the Kerala Strikers, was asked to get off an Indigo airlines flight for allegedly misbehaving with the crew.

The Kerala Strikers is one of the teams in a non-professional Celebrity Cricket League that comprises actors.

28 members of that team were asked to get off a Hyderabad-bound Indigo flight at the Cochin airport this afternoon, allegedly over some comments that they made during a security demonstration. 

After the crew complained, the pilot reportedly refused to fly unless the team got off the plane.

The flight was to leave at 1 pm but finally did an hour and a half later after the row.

The team finally left on the 4:30 pm flight, reportedly after buying new tickets. 

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Easyindia Launch India's First Departmental Store In India

Easyindia Enterprises launch online departmental store in india as name infibuy. Infibuy.in selling Mobile phones, Laptop, Electronics and much more with infibeam platform. Infibuy now selling product from infibeam a buildabazaar company as distributor as soon as infibuy launch their own platform . 

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Sridevi approached for comedy, drama films

Sridevi made her much awaited comeback to the silver screen with English Vinglish

Bollywood veteran Sridevi, who made a come back on the silver screen with a sterling performance inEnglish Vinglish has been approached for a comedy and drama film.

"There are two-three subjects lined up including a comedy, drama and a revenge drama film. Sridevijiand Boneyji (producer husband Boney Kapoor) have shortlisted a couple of stories but we are looking to sign a right director," sources close to the actress said.

"She (Sridevi) wants to do a film which a family audience can enjoy and also her role has to be exceptional," the source said.

The decision on which project the 50-year-old star will kickstart will be taken in two-three months. "Besides, there are other subjects also. It is not decided if Boneyji will be producing these films," the source said.

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Facebook to buy WhatsApp

Facebook to buy WhatsApp for $19 billion 

Facebook Inc will buy fast-growing mobile-messaging startup WhatsApp for $19 billion in cash and stock in a landmark deal that places the world's largest social network closer to the heart of mobile communications and may bring younger users into the fold.

The transaction involves $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in stock and $3 billion in restricted stock that vests over several years. The WhatsApp deal is worth more than Facebook raised in its own IPO and underscores the social network's determination to win the market for messaging.

Founded by a Ukrainian immigrant who dropped out of college, Jan Koum, and a Stanford alumnus, Brian Acton, WhatsApp is a Silicon Valley startup fairy tale, rocketing to 450 million users in five years and adding another million daily.

"No one in the history of the world has ever done something like this," Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said on a conference call on Wednesday.

Zuckerberg, who famously closed a $1 billion deal to buy photo-sharing service Instagram over a weekend in mid-2012, revealed on Wednesday that he proposed the tie-up over dinner with CEO Koum just 10 days earlier, on the night of February 9.

WhatsApp was the leader among a wave of smartphone-based messaging apps that are now sweeping across North America, Asia and Europe. Although WhatsApp has adhered strictly to its core functionality of mimicking texting, other apps, such as Line in Japan or Tencent Holdings Ltd's WeChat, offer games or even e-commerce on top of their popular messaging features.

The deal provides Facebook entree to new users, including teens who eschew the mainstream social networks but prefer WhatsApp and rivals, which have exploded in size as private messaging takes off.

"People are calling them 'Facebook Nevers,'" said Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed and an early investor in Snapchat.

How the service will pay for itself is not yet clear.

Zuckerberg and Koum on the conference call did not say how the company would make money beyond a $1 annual fee, which is not charged for the first year. "The right strategy is to continue to focus on growth and product," Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg and Koum said that WhatsApp will continue to operate independently, and promised to continue its policy of no advertising.

"Communication is the one thing that you have to use daily, and it has a strong network effect," said Jonathan Teo, an early investor in Snapchat, another red-hot messaging company that flirted year ago with a multibillion dollar acquisition offer from Facebook.

"Facebook is more about content and has not yet fully figured out communication."

PRICE TAG

Even so, many balked at the price tag.

Facebook is paying $42 per user with the deal, dwarfing its own $33 per user cost of acquiring Instagram. By comparison, Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten just bought messaging service Viber for $3 per user, in a $900 million deal.

Rick Summer, an analyst with Morningstar, warned that while investors may welcome the addition of such a high-growth asset, it may point to an inherent weakness in the social networking company that has seen growth slow in recent quarters.

"This is a tacit admission that Facebook can't do things that other networks are doing," he said, pointing to the fact that Facebook had photo-sharing and messaging before it bought Instagram and WhatsApp.

"They can't replicate what other companies are doing so they go out and buy them. That's not all together encouraging necessarily and I think deals like these won't be the last one and that is something for investors to consider."

Venture capitalist Sequoia Capital, which invested in WhatsApp in February 2011 and led three rounds of financing altogether, holds a stake worth roughly $3 billion of the $19 billion valuation, according to people familiar with the matter.

"Goodness gracious, it's a good deal for WhatsApp," said Teo, the early investor in Snapchat.

Facebook pledged a break-up fee of $1 billion in cash and $1 billion in stock if the deal falls through.

Facebook was advised by Allen & Co, while WhatsApp has enlisted Morgan Stanley for the deal.

Shares in Facebook slid 2.5 percent to $66.36 after hours, from a close of $68.06 on the Nasdaq.

"No matter how you look at it this is an expensive deal and a very big bet and very big bets either work out or they perform quite poorly," Summer said. "Given the relative size, the enterprise valuations this is a very significant deal and it may not be the last one."

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