Shortly after he was born in 1955, Steven Paul was adopted by Steve and Clara Jobs. He was raised in Mountain View, California, not too far from what would later become Silicon Valley.

Sensing that their son was not adjusting well at school, the family moved to Los Altos, where he attended Homestead High School. A technology buff at an early stage, and by some accounts a loner, Steve wound up working summers at Hewlett Packard (NYSE: HWP). It was there where he first met Steve "Woz" Wozniak. Woz was a gadget wizard and at the time he was perfecting an illegal blue box.

The blue box would attach to a telephone and allow for free long distance calls. Steve helped Woz with a few blue box sales and a friendship was forged. After graduating from Homestead, Steve enrolled at Reed College, a few hours north in Portland, Oregon. He struggled through his first semester before doing what many teenaged computer whizzes do -- he dropped out. It was the rebellious anti-establishment move of choice at the time. Woz, too, was a dropout and left the University of California at Berkeley without a diploma.

Steve worked a few odd jobs, including a summer stint at an apple orchard which would one day serve as the inspiration for Apple Computer (Nasdaq: AAPL). In 1974 he joined his friend Steve "Woz" Wozniak at Atari. Developing video games for the console powerhouse should have been fulfilling for the tech-inspired duo, but it proved to be short-lived. Steve only wanted to save up enough money to pay for an excursion to India. Once he did, he moved on.

Woz tired as well and went back to Hewlett Packard. When Steve returned to California after his spiritual expedition to India, he began to attend meetings of Woz's Homebrew Computer Club. At Steve's urging, Woz eventually left his position at Hewlett Packard for a more exciting venture. Steve and Woz turned the Job family's garage into a workshop and set out to build a personal computer.Steve was just 21 years old. Woz was five years his senior.

What the elder had in technological proficiency Steve made up for in business smarts and ambition. Without the luxury of venture capital, the two gave up their most prized possessions to fund the company. Steve sold his Volkswagen. Woz ditched his prized scientific calculator. After a year of garage toil the Apple I was born. The first sale was for a few dozen machines to the nearby Byte Shop. Despite its limitations (the computer had all of 4k of memory) it became one of the first personal computers to be mass-produced. Marketed at the demonic price of $666, sales of the monitorless computer (it plugged into the back of television sets) ran just shy of the million dollar mark.

Soon the Apple II was rolled out and became a huge success. Steve sought out a new market -- school children. He saw children as potential long-term Apple customers and set out to place Apple systems in schools. By this time IBM (NYSE: IBM) had entered the personal computer market. Steve managed to beat IBM to the classroom, but Apple would eventually lose its stronghold. Three years later, riding a wave of pioneering success, Apple Computer was taken public by Hambrecht & Quist and Morgan Stanley -- providing Steve and Woz the means to buy all the VW vans and HP scientific calculators that money can buy.

The shares were priced at $22 and popped to $29 on the first trading day, giving the company a market capitalization of just over $1 billion.While the company would continue to flourish, including the Macintosh rollout just four years later, both Woz and Steve would eventually get weeded out of the very company they had founded. It all started in 1983 when Steve convinced John Sculley to leave Pepsi (NYSE: PEP) and become Apple's president.

"If you stay at Pepsi, five years from now all you'll have accomplished is selling a lot more sugar water to kids," Steve said. "If you come to Apple you can change the world."Sculley may not have changed the world in general, but he did change Steve's world as he had come to know it. While the two had initially hit it off, soon their differences became apparent. Sculley was a purist businessman who saw Steve as a counterculture liability. Steve grew to see Sculley as incapable of understanding the computer industry.

In 1985, just a few months after Woz left the company, a power struggle ensued and Steve lost.Steve took some time off to travel through Europe, pondering his next step. Inspired by a lack of high-end computerized machinery he formed NeXT. The hardware company proved to be a bigger failure than the ill-fated Apple III, but there was promise in the operating system.In 1996, three years after Sculley resigned from Apple, the company bought out the remains of NeXT, a move to get Steve back into the company's good graces.

Steve was already being lauded as a visionary, mostly on the heels of his 1986 majority stake purchase of the computer-animation studio Pixar (Nasdaq: PIXR) from George Lucas. Steve had helped cut a production deal with Disney (NYSE: DIS) and after Pixar's 1995 Toy Story became the second-highest grossing animated feature film of all time he got Disney to sweeten the pot.Apple investors cheered the return of Jobs.

Initially brought on as a consultant and interim-chairman, he has stripped the "interim" prefix to lead the company permanently. That is where Steve is today, living a dual life. He is actively overseeing Apple's return to consistent profitability on the heels of the successful iMac and G3 system introductions. Since he has rejoined Apple the shares have regained their winning ways.

"If youth have to sing the song of India, India should become a developed country which is free from poverty, illiteracy and un-employment and is buoyant with economic prosperity, national security and internal harmony. To create this transformation we all have to resolve ourselves to work and sweat for the national development."
He was merely putting forth the vision and resolve he has shown over the years to help India become a strong and secure country, slowly but surely.

Born on 15 October 1931 at Dhanushkodi in the Rameswaram district of Tamil Nadu, Dr Kalam’s father had to rent boats out to fishermen to pay this genius’ school fees. He received secondary education at the Schwartz School, a missionary institute in Ramanathapuram, and later joined the St. Joseph’s College at Tiruchirapalli, where he graduated with a Bachelor in Science. He went on to study Aeronautical engineering at the Madras Institute of Technology.

Even though a devout Muslim, his favourite pastimes include reading Hindu scriptures like the Bhagvad Gita, plucking the veena and writing poetry in Tamil, his first language. Unlike other great Indian Scientists, he was neither educated abroad, nor was his family financially very strong to support his academic pursuits.

Branded as '200 percent Indian' by his colleagues and acquaintances, ‘India’s Missile Man’, Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam has done the country proud on many fronts.

"Do things yourself. Do not indulge in short-cuts by importing equipment", he thundered after the famed Pokhran-2 nuclear blasts in 1998. A strong advocate of this philosophy, he distributed newspapers at a young age to help with household expenses.

Thoroughly Indian, the only brief exposure that he got abroad was in 1963-64 when he was invited by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to spend four months in the United States at the Wallops Island Rocketry Centre and the Langley Research Centre.
Dr Kalam joined the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) in 1958 and in his forty-year career as a scientist, achieved many milestones. He later joined the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) where he succeeded in putting the 35-kg Rohini-I satellite on a low-earth orbit with help of the SLV-III (Satellite Launch Vehicle). After spending 19 fruitful years in ISRO, he returned to DRDO to head the country’s integrated Missile Development Programme, which culminated in the successful launch of the Agni and Prithvi missiles.
A great humanitarian, he extended his knowledge of space technology and mechanisms to help disabled children, replacing their 3-kg metal supporters with very light braces made of carbon, which weigh just 300 grams.

A vegetarian and a teetotaller, Dr Kalam recites the Quran and the Bhagvad Gita with equal ease. A confirmed bachelor, his modesty is evident from the fact that he gives all the credit to his colleagues.

Totally dedicated to the development of the nation, he has been felicitated with many national awards. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1981, the Padma Vibhushan in 1990 and the HK Firodia Award for excellence in science and technology in 1996. More recently, he was honoured with the Bharat Ratna in 1997, the highest civilian award in India. He is also the recipient of the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration in the same year.

Dr Kalam dreams of a strong India. "We must think and act like a nation of a billion people." He is on a mission to ignite the young minds of India and regularly meets students of all ages and backgrounds all over the country, urging them to pursue their dreams and make the nation proud.

It takes a bit of searching to find Sergey Brin’s office at the Googleplex. Tucked away in a corner of Building #43 on this sprawling campus near the southern tip of San Francisco Bay, past rows of colorfully decorated cubicles and dorm-like meeting spaces, Office 211 has a nondescript exterior and sits far from the public eye. Although it takes several twists and turns to get there, his office is not protected—as you would expect for the cofounder of a $150-billion company—by a Russian nesting doll’s worth of doors and gatekeepers.

Sergey, 33, shares the space with his Google cofounder, fellow Stanford Ph.D. dropout and billionaire pal, 34-year-old Larry Page, an arrangement that began eight years ago in the company’s first humble headquarters in a Menlo Park, California, garage. Since then, Google has grown from just another Silicon Valley startup into the world’s largest media corporation; in fact, based on its recent stock price of $513 per share, Google, which has made searching the Web easy and even fun, is larger than Disney, General Motors and McDonald’s combined. It achieved these lofty heights by revolutionizing how people surf the Internet: Before Sergey and Larry analyzed the links between web pages to deliver search results speedily based on relevance, looking up information on the Web was a shot in the dark.

Stepping through the sliding glass door into their office is like walking into a playroom for tech-savvy adults. A row of sleek flat-screen monitors lining one wall displays critical information: email, calendars, documents and, naturally, the Google search engine. Assorted green plants and an air purifier keep the oxygen flowing, while medicine balls provide appropriately kinetic seating. Upstairs, a private mezzanine with Astroturf carpeting and an electric massage chair afford Sergey and Larry a comfortable perch from which to entertain visitors and survey the carnival of innovation going on below. And there is ample space for walking around, which is absolutely essential for Sergey, who just can’t seem to sit still.

Trim and boyishly handsome, with low sloping shoulders that give him a perpetually relaxed appearance, Sergey bounces around the Googleplex with apparently endless energy. He has dark hair, penetrating eyes and a puckish sense of humor that often catches people off guard. A typical workday finds him in jeans, sneakers and a fitted black T-shirt, though his casual manner belies a serious, even aggressive sense of purpose. This intensity emerges during weekly strategy meetings, where Sergey and Larry—who share the title of president—command the last word on approving new products, reviewing new hires and funding long-term research. Sergey also holds sway over the unscientific but all-important realms of people, policy and politics. Google’s workers enjoy such family-friendly perks as three free meals a day, free home food delivery for new parents, designated private spaces for nursing mothers, and full on-site medical care, all of which recently led Fortune magazine to rank the company as the #1 place to work in the country.

The co-presidents share management duties with Eric Schmidt, a seasoned software executive whom they hired as chief executive officer in 2001 to oversee the day-to-day aspects of Google’s business—in short, to be the “adult” in the playroom. But they have no intention of ceding control. Since day one, they have resisted outside meddling, preferring to do everything their own way, from opting to piece together computers on the cheap (and build a computer casing out of Lego blocks) to flouting Wall Street in an unconventional initial public offering.Blazing one’s own trail comes naturally to Sergey. The Moscow-born entrepreneur and his parents have been doing it their entire lives.

On December 16, 2005, 16 months after the company’s high-flying initial stock auction, Google closed its biggest deal yet: a $1-billion advertising partnership with America Online, the popular Internet service provider.

That evening, by coincidence, I am meeting with Sergey’s parents at their home in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Michael Brin, wearing a black fleece vest emblazoned with the multicolored Google logo, greets me in the driveway. I ask if he has heard the big news. “We spoke with Sergey earlier today and he didn’t mention anything,” he tells me. “He did say he was on his way home from yoga.”

Michael, 59, a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his wife, Eugenia, 58, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, are gracious and down-to-earth and still somewhat astonished by their son’s success. “It’s mind-boggling,” marvels Genia, as family and friends call her. She speaks slowly, in a syrupy, Russian-accented English that quickens when she is competing with her husband. “It’s hard to comprehend, really. He was a very capable child in math and computers, but we could have never imagined this.” Michael, in his milder accent, adds with typical pragmatism, “Google has saved more time for more people than anything else in the world.”

They sit me down at the dining room table, clearing off papers to make space for a spread of cheese and fruit. The room itself is simply decorated, even sparse; the only signs of wealth I can see anywhere are a big-screen TV in the living room and a Lexus in the driveway.
The Brins are a compact, young-looking couple; Michael is skeptical in demeanor with a precise manner of speaking, and Genia soft and nurturing. Both have sincere, easygoing laughs. We talk for several hours, interrupted occasionally by Michael’s cigarette breaks, for which he heads outside with the family dog, Toby. Smoking is a habit he brought with him from the Soviet Union in 1979, when he immigrated to the United States with his mother, Maya, Genia and Sergey, then six. (A second son, Sam, was born in 1987.)

One of Michael’s stories particularly strikes me. In the summer of 1990, a few weeks before Sergey’s 17th birthday, Michael led a group of gifted high school math students on a two-week exchange program to the Soviet Union. He decided to bring the family along, despite uneasiness about the welcome they could expect from Communist authorities. It would give them a chance to visit family members still living in Moscow, including Sergey’s paternal grandfather, like Michael, a Ph.D. mathematician.

It didn’t take long for Sergey, a precocious teenager about to enter college, to size up his former environs. The Soviet empire was crumbling and, in the drab, cinder-block landscape and people’s stony mien of resignation, he could see first-hand the bleak future that would have been his. On the second day of the trip, while the group toured a sanitarium in the countryside near Moscow, Sergey took his father aside, looked him in the eye and said, “Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.”

“There were only two occasions when my children were grateful to me,” Michael says dryly, and I get the sense that he is completely serious. The other occasion, he says, involved Sergey’s younger brother, Sam, and the repair of a broken toilet.

Genia, seated next to him, protests. “Misha, what are you talking about!?” she exclaims, as she often does when their memories differ or when she feels Michael is editorializing.

As Sergey recalls, the trip awakened his childhood fear of authority. His crisp tenor voice, tinged with a faint accent that is no longer identifiably Russian, came to me via satellite phone as he flew to Asia last November. Teenagers have their own way of transforming fear into defiance, Sergey reflects, remembering that his impulse on confronting Soviet oppression had been to throw pebbles at a police car. The two officers sitting inside got out of the car “quite upset” he says but, luckily, his parents were able to defuse the matter.

“My rebelliousness, I think, came out of being born in Moscow,” Sergey says, adding, “I’d say this is something that followed me into adulthood.”

At a bagel shop across the street from the Maryland campus where he has taught dynamical systems and statistics for 25 years, Michael talks of the discrimination that drove him to take his family out of Russia. It’s a bitter cold day in College Park, reminiscent of winter in Moscow. Over a lunch of soup and sandwiches, Michael explains how he was forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer even before he reached college. Officially, anti-Semitism didn’t exist in the U.S.S.R. but, in reality, Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities. Jews were excluded from the physics department, in particular, at the prestigious Moscow State University, because Soviet leaders did not trust them with nuclear rocket research. Unfortunately for Michael, astronomy fell under the rubric of physics.

Michael opted to study mathematics instead. But gaining acceptance to the math department at Moscow State, home of arguably the brightest mathematicians in the world, also proved exceedingly difficult. Discrimination there was administered by means of entrance exams for which Jews were tested in different rooms from other applicants—morbidly nicknamed “gas chambers”—and graded more harshly. Nevertheless, with help from a well-connected family friend, Michael was accepted and in 1970 graduated with an honors degree.

“I had all A’s except for three classes where I got B’s: history of the Communist Party, military training and statistics,” he says. “But nobody would even consider me for graduate school because I was Jewish. That was normal.” So Michael became an economist for GOSPLAN, the central planning agency. “I was trying to prove that, in a few years, living standards in Russia would be higher than in the United States,” he says. “And I proved it. I know enough about math to prove whatever you want.”

He continued to study mathematics on his own, sneaking into evening seminars at the university and writing research papers. After several were published, Brin began a doctoral thesis. At the time, a student in the Soviet Union could earn a doctorate without going to graduate school if he passed certain exams and an institution agreed to consider his thesis. Michael found two advisers, an official adviser, an ethnic Russian, and an informal Jewish mentor. (“Jews could not have Jewish advisers,” he says.) With their help, he successfully defended his thesis at a university in Kharkov, Ukraine, but life didn’t change much even after he received his Ph.D. He continued in his day job at GOSPLAN and received a 100-ruble raise. “I thought I was rich. Life was beautiful,” he says with a wry chuckle.

For Genia, life in Moscow was also comfortable enough. She, too, had managed to overcome the entrance hurdles to attend Moscow State, graduating from the School of Mechanics and Mathematics. In a research lab of the Soviet Oil and Gas Institute, a prestigious industrial school, she worked alongside a number of other Jews. “I was content in my job and had many friends,” she says. The Brins’ encounters with institutional anti-Semitism did not extend to day-to-day interactions with colleagues and neighbors. Highly assimilated into Russian culture, they were part of the intelligentsia and had a circle of university-educated friends. Occupying a tiny, three-room apartment in central Moscow, 350 square feet in all shared with Michael’s mother, they were better off than many Muscovites who still lived in communal apartments. After Sergey was born, on August 21, 1973, the courtyard of their hulking five-story building became his playground. In keeping with Russian tradition, Sergey spent two hours in the morning and evening each day outdoors, regardless of the season.

As we talk at the bagel shop, Michael keeps careful watch on the time. Every so often he leaps from his chair and dashes outside. This isn’t just for a smoke, although he does light up. He’s also keeping close tabs on the parking meters, his and mine, and takes care when the time runs out to drop in more quarters.

The history of Russian Jewish emigration in the mid-1970s can be neatly summarized in a joke from the era: Two Jews are talking in the street, a third walks by and says to them, “I don’t know what you’re talking about but yes, it’s time to get out of here!”
“I’ve known for a long time that my father wasn’t able to pursue the career he wanted,” Sergey tells me. As a young boy, though, Sergey had only a vague awareness of why his family wanted to leave their native Russia. He picked up the ugly details of the anti-Semitism they faced bit by bit years later, he says. Nevertheless, he sensed, early on, all of the things that he wasn’t: He wasn’t Russian. He wasn’t welcome in his own country. He wasn’t going to get a fair shake in advancing through its schools. Further complicating his understanding of his Jewish identity was the fact that, under the ardently atheist Soviet regime, there were few religious or cultural models of what being Jewish was. The negatives were all he had.

Sergey is too young to remember the day, in the summer of 1977, when his father came home and announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. “We cannot stay here any more,” he told his wife and mother. He had arrived at his decision while attending a mathematics conference in Warsaw. For the first time, he had been able to mingle freely with colleagues from the United States, France, England and Germany. Discovering that his intellectual brethren in the West “were not monsters,” he listened as they described the opportunities and comforts of life beyond the Iron Curtain. “He said he wouldn’t stay, now that he had seen what life could be about,” says Genia.

The couple knew, of course, the perils of applying for an exit visa. They could easily end up refuseniks, unable to find work, shunned, in perpetual limbo. Nobody had promised Michael a position abroad but he was confident he could find work in the West that was intellectually stimulating and would support the family. Genia, however, was unconvinced. They had lived in Moscow their entire lives. They had decent jobs and a young son. Was it worth it to try to leave? “I didn’t want to go,” she says. “It took a while for me and his mother to agree. I had a lot more attachments.” It was up to Michael to do the convincing. “I was the only one in the family who decided it was really important to leave—not in some distant future,” he says.

The Brins’ story provides me with a clue to the origins of Sergey’s entrepreneurial instincts. His parents, academics through and through, deny any role in forming their son’s considerable business acumen—“He did not learn it from us, absolutely not our area,” Michael says. Yet Sergey’s willingness to take risks, his sense of whom to trust and ask for help, his vision to see something better and the conviction to go after it—these traits are evident in much of what Michael Brin did in circumventing the system and working twice as hard as others to earn his doctorate, then leave the Soviet Union.

For Genia, the decision ultimately came down to Sergey. While her husband admits he was thinking as much about his own future as his son’s, for her, “it was 80/20 about Sergey.” They formally applied for an exit visa in September 1978. Michael was promptly fired. Genia, who had obtained her job through a relative, had to quit to insulate him from any recrimination. “When he got a whiff of our intentions,” she says, “he said ‘please get out of there as soon as possible.’ It had to be a secret from everybody at work, my real reason for leaving. So I lied to all of my coworkers that I was simply leaving my job because I got another job, where I would only have to be at work three days a week and the salary would be higher. I made up—totally made up—the name of a place where I was planning to work.” There was no other job, of course, and suddenly they found themselves with no income. To get by, Michael translated technical books into English, but it was painstaking work. He also began to teach himself computer programming, having no expectation of getting an academic position if they ever got out. When Genia found temporary work, again lying about her situation, they shared responsibility for looking after Sergey, who stayed at home rather than attend a miserable Soviet pre-school.And then they waited.

For many Soviet Jews, exit visas never came. But, in May 1979, the Brins were granted papers to leave the U.S.S.R. “We hoped it would happen,” Genia says, “but we were completely surprised by how quickly it did.” The timing was fortuitous: They were among the last Jews allowed to leave until the Gorbachev era.

Sergey, who turned six that summer, remembers what followed as simply “unsettling”—literally so. “We were in different places from day to day,” he says. The journey was a blur. First Vienna, where the family was met by representatives of HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which helped thousands of Eastern European Jews establish new lives in the free world. Then, on to the suburbs of Paris, where Michael’s “unofficial” Jewish Ph.D. advisor, Anatole Katok, had arranged a temporary research position for him at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques. Katok, who had emigrated the year before with his family, looked after the Brins and paved the way for Michael to teach at Maryland.

When the family finally landed in America on October 25, they were met at New York’s Kennedy Airport by friends from Moscow. Sergey’s first memory of the United States was of sitting in the backseat of the car, amazed at all the giant automobiles on the highway as their hosts drove them home to Long Island.

The Brins found a house to rent in Maryland—a simple, cinder-block structure in a lower-middle-class neighborhood not far from the university campus. With a $2,000 loan from the Jewish community, they bought a 1973 Ford Maverick. And, at Katok’s suggestion, they enrolled Sergey in Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland.
He struggled to adjust. Bright-eyed and bashful, with only a rudimentary knowledge of English, Sergey spoke with a heavy accent when he started school. “It was a difficult year for him, the first year,” recalls Genia. “We were constantly discussing the fact we had been told that children are like sponges, that they immediately grasp the language and have no problem, and that wasn’t the case.”

Patty Barshay, the school’s director, became a friend and mentor to Sergey and his parents. She invited them to a party at her house that first December (“a bunch of Jewish people with nothing to do on Christmas Day”) and wound up teaching Genia how to drive. Everywhere they turned, there was so much to take in. “I remember them inviting me over for dinner one day,” Barshay says, “and I asked Genia, ‘What kind of meat is this?’ She had no idea. They had never seen so much meat” as American supermarkets offer.

When I ask about her former pupil, Barshay lights up, obviously proud of Sergey’s achievements. “Sergey wasn’t a particularly outgoing child,” she says, “but he always had the self-confidence to pursue what he had his mind set on.”
He gravitated toward puzzles, maps and math games that taught multiplication. “I really enjoyed the Montessori method,” he tells me. “I could grow at my own pace.” He adds that the Montessori environment—which gives students the freedom to choose activities that suit their interests—helped foster his creativity.
“He was interested in everything,” Barshay says, but adds, “I never thought he was any brighter than anyone else.”

One thing the Brins shared with thousands of other families emigrating to the West from the Soviet Union was the discovery that, suddenly, they were free to be Jews.
“Russian Jews lacked the vocabulary to even articulate what they were feeling,” says Lenny Gusel, the founder of a San Francisco-based network of Russian-Jewish immigrants; many newcomers he encounters struggle with this fundamental change. “They were considered Jews back home. Here they were considered Russians. Many longed just to assimilate as Americans.” Gusel’s group, which he calls the “79ers,” after the peak year of immigration in the 1970s, and its New York cousin, RJeneration, have attracted hundreds of 20- and 30-something immigrants who grapple with their Jewish identity. “Sergey is the absolute emblem of our group, the number one Russian-Jewish immigrant success story,” he says.

The Brins were no different from their fellow immigrants in that being Jewish was an ethnic, not a religious experience. “We felt our Jewishness in different ways, not by keeping kosher or going to synagogue. It is genetic,” explains Michael. “We were not very religious. My wife doesn’t eat on Yom Kippur; I do.” Genia interjects: “We always have a Passover dinner. We have a seder. I have the recipe for gefilte fish from my grandmother.”
Religious or not, on arriving in the suburbs of Washington, the Brins were adopted by a synagogue, Mishkan Torah of Greenbelt, Maryland, which helped them acquire furnishings for their home. “We didn’t need that much, but we saw how much the community helped other families,” Genia says.

Sergey attended Hebrew school at Mishkan Torah for the better part of three years but hated the language instruction and everything else, too. “He was teased there by other kids and he begged us not to send him any more,” his mother remembers. “Eventually, it worked.” The Conservative congregation turned out to be too religious for the Brins and they drifted. When a three-week trip to Israel awakened 11-year-old Sergey’s interest in all things Jewish, the family inquired at another synagogue about restarting studies to prepare for a bar mitzvah. But the rabbi said it would take more than a year to catch up and Sergey, who didn’t want to wait past his 13th birthday, abandoned the pursuit.

If there was one Jewish value the Brin family upheld without reservation, Michael says, it was scholarship. Sergey’s brother—who in his younger years was more fond of basketball than homework—even got the notion that advanced degrees were mandatory for all professions. “Sam once asked us, ‘Is it true that before you play in the N.B.A. you have to get a Ph.D.?’” recalls his dad. To which the professor couldn’t resist replying, “Yes, Sam, that’s it!”
Sergey attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School, a large public school in Greenbelt. He raced through in three years, amassing a year’s worth of college credits that would enable him to finish college in three years as well. At the University of Maryland, he majored in mathematics and computer science and graduated near the top of his class. When he won a prestigious National Science Foundation scholarship for graduate school, he insisted on Stanford. (M.I.T. had rejected him.) Aside from the physical beauty of Stanford’s campus, Sergey knew the school’s reputation for supporting high-tech entrepreneurs. At the time, though, his focus was squarely on getting his doctorate.

Personable, with an easy smile, Sergey brims with a healthy self-assuredness that at times spills over into arrogance. At Stanford, he was known for his habit of bursting in on professors without knocking. One of his advisers, Rajeev Motwani, recalls, “He was the brash young man. But he was so smart, it just oozed out of him.” His abiding interest was computer science, specifically the field of “data mining,” or how to extract meaningful patterns from mountains of information. But he also took time out to enjoy Stanford social life and all manner of sports: skiing, rollerblading, gymnastics, even trapeze. His father once remarked, “I asked him if he was taking any advanced courses, and he said, ‘yes, advanced swimming.’”

What came next is Google legend. In the spring of 1995, during a prospective student weekend, Sergey met an opinionated computer science student from the University of Michigan named Larry Page. They talked and argued over the course of two days, each finding the other cocky and obnoxious. They also formed an instant connection, relishing the intellectual combat.
Like Sergey, Larry is the son of high-powered intellects steeped in computer science. His father, Carl Victor Page, a computer science professor at Michigan State University until his death in 1996, received one of the first Ph.D.s awarded in the field. His mother, Gloria, holds a master’s degree in computer science and has taught college programming classes. The two young graduate students also shared a Jewish background. Larry’s maternal grandfather made aliyah and lived in the desert town of Arad near the Dead Sea, working as a tool and die maker, and his mother was raised Jewish. Larry, however, brought up in the mold of his father, whose religion was technology, does not readily identify as a Jew. He, too, never had a bar mitzvah.

Larry and Sergey soon began working on ways to harness information on the World Wide Web, spending so much time together that they took on a joint identity, “LarryandSergey.” By 1996, Larry had hit on the idea of using the links between web pages to rank their relative importance. Borrowing from academia the concept of citations in research papers as a measure of topicality and value, he and Brin applied that thinking to the Web: if one page linked to another, it was in effect “citing” or casting a vote for that page. The more votes a page had, the more valuable it was. The concept seems rather obvious in retrospect, and today most search engines operate on this principle. But, at the time, it was groundbreaking. Calling their new invention Google—a misspelling of a very large number in mathematics—Larry and Sergey shopped it around to various companies for the price of $1 million.

No one was interested. In the technology boom of the late 1990s, conventional thinking was that so-called web portals like Yahoo! and AOL, which offered email, news, weather and more, would make the most money. No one cared about search. But Sergey and Larry knew they were on to something, so they decided to take leaves of absence from Stanford and build a company themselves. Sergey’s parents were skeptical. “We were definitely upset,” Genia says. “We thought everybody in their right mind ought to get a Ph.D.”

Soliciting funds from faculty members, family and friends, Sergey and Larry scraped together enough to buy some servers and rent that famous garage in Menlo Park. Their venture quickly bore fruit: After viewing a quick demo, Sun Microsystems cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim (himself a Jewish immigrant from Germany) wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” The only problem was, “Google, Inc.” did not yet exist—the company hadn’t yet been incorporated. For two weeks, as they handled the paperwork, the young men had nowhere to deposit the money.
It is difficult to pinpoint the moment when Google became a true American phenomenon. Traditional measures, such as gracing the cover of Time magazine or being profiled on 60 Minutes, seem irrelevant when it comes to the fast-moving world of the Internet. But there’s no doubt about the date that Wall Street began to take the quirky California company seriously. It was April 29, 2004, when Google formally filed paperwork for its initial public offering of stock.
Two things shocked the investment world that day.

First were the company’s staggeringly large revenue and profit figures, which until then had been closely guarded secrets. No one had dreamed that the subtle text advertisements Google placed alongside search results—which many web users don’t even recognize as ads—could be so profitable. Second was the ruthlessly earnest “founders’ letter” that Sergey and Larry had included with the filing, which began by stating that Google was “not a conventional company” and did not intend to become one. They followed up that show of bravado by granting an interview to Playboy for publication during a mandatory “quiet period” before the public offering, when securities regulations restrict company executives’ public comments. The misdeed prompted many to wonder whether the Google founders were careless and immature or just incorrigible troublemakers. It didn’t help that they had decided to make it tough for Wall Street insiders to dominate the stock offering by selling shares via public auction—their way of making the process more democratic and transparent.

On August 16, 2004, its first day of trading, Google stock shot from $85 to $100 per share. Last November, it crossed the $500 mark, a number seldom seen in stock market history and far above the share prices of rivals Microsoft and Yahoo! At that price, Sergey and Larry, who together hold a controlling interest the company, each boast an estimated net worth of $15 billion.

What does that sort of money do to a 33-year-old? If you’re Sergey, you buy a new house on the peninsula south of San Francisco, trade in your hybrid Toyota Prius for a fancier ride, and continue shopping at Costco. “From my parents, I certainly learned to be frugal and to be happy without very many things,” Sergey tells me. “It’s interesting—I still find myself not wanting to leave anything on the plate uneaten. I still look at prices. I try to force myself to do this less, not to be so frugal. But I was raised being happy with not so much.” His parents say Sergey taught them to shop at Costco, too. “He bought us a membership,” Michael says. “It’s a store that he knows and understands.”

Sergey also understands something about cooking, a skill he picked up on his own. “A month before leaving [for Stanford], he realized he didn’t know how to cook, so he learned,” his mother tells me. Now, he owns a pasta machine and often joins his father in the kitchen when he comes home to visit. His specialty is Chernobyl Chili—“45 minutes in the microwave.”
The trappings of extreme wealth haven’t passed Sergey by entirely. In 2005, he and Larry jointly purchased a Boeing 767 jet and had it refitted for personal use. Interior sketches of the “party airplane”—which has two staterooms, sitting and dining areas, a large galley and seating for 50—surfaced in The Wall Street Journal last July. At one point, according to the plane’s designer, the Google founders got into a spat over Sergey’s insistence on a “California” king-sized bed in his private cabin. CEO Schmidt had to mediate, telling them, “Sergey, you can have whatever bed you want in your room; Larry, you can have whatever bed you want in your bedroom. Let’s move on.”

While everyone I’ve talked to who knows them well repeats the same line—“They’re good guys”—gossip web sites occasionally print rumors of Larry and Sergey’s soirees in posh private clubs and other typical jet-setter antics. They are without a doubt two of the most eligible bachelors on Google Earth, but both are reported to be in serious relationships: Larry with Stanford graduate student Lucy Southworth, and Sergey with Anne Wojcicki, a healthcare investor and the sister of Google executive Susan Wojcicki, who owned the garage where Google got started. In a 2001 interview for the now-defunct web site Women.com, Genia said she hoped Sergey would find “somebody exciting who could be really interesting to him….[who] had a sense of humor that could match his.” As one might expect, she also prefers that Sergey marry a Jewish girl. “I hope that he would keep it in mind,” she confided.

The Ten Commandments it’s not, but Google does operate with a moral code of sorts: “Don’t Be Evil.” The maxim is supposed to guide behavior at all levels of the company. When pressed for clarification, Eric Schmidt has famously said, “Evil is whatever Sergey says is evil.”
One malevolent practice, in Google’s view, is tampering with or otherwise censoring the list of results produced by a Google search. An early test of the Google founders’ commitment to providing unfiltered information struck very close to home.

The anti-Semitic web site “Jew Watch” appeared prominently in Google results for searches on the term “Jew,” prompting some Jewish groups to demand that Google remove the defamatory site from the top of its listings. Google refused. Sergey said at the time, “I certainly am very offended by the site, but the objectivity of our rankings is one of our very important principles.” As a compromise, Google displays a warning at the top of questionable pages entitled “Offensive Search Results,” which links to a fuller explanation of Google’s policy: “Our search results are generated completely objectively and are independent of the beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google.”

The most telling measure of Google’s moral code has come in China, the world’s second largest Internet market, where an army of Communist Party bureaucrats actively monitors and censors the Internet. During months of intense debate at the Googleplex, Sergey, Larry and other executives weighed the vast profit potential of launching a China-based service against their opposition to the country’s odious human rights abuses. Ever the computer geeks, Schmidt said they actually worked up an “evil scale.” To their minds, operating a censored Google site in China was a lesser evil than providing spotty, substandard service from outside the country. The outcome also happened to favor the profit motive. Viewed against the backdrop of Sergey’s distaste for authority, the decision to cave in to China’s totalitarian leadership seems out of character.

Sergey’s public comments on the matter have evolved to reflect this contradiction. While firmly defending the decision at first, he later acknowledged that Google had “compromised” its principles. “Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense,” he allowed in June, but added, “It’s not where we chose to go right now.”

How Google deals with such thorny matters as accommodating government requests for information is not merely of passing interest. As the world’s dominant search engine, used some 300 million times daily, it marshals an immense amount of data about our collective interests, needs and desires. And that’s not all. Because every search typed into Google is stored indefinitely and can often be traced to individual computer users, privacy advocates point out that clever government prosecutors or divorce lawyers could get their hands on our personal digital dossiers. Google’s motto may be “Don’t Be Evil,” but it all depends into whose hands this information falls.

Does any company founded by two Jews, no matter how assimilated, necessarily retain some defining Jewish characteristics? The Google masterminds’ penchant for pushing boundaries—without asking permission—might as well be called chutzpah. However you label it, it’s an attitude that runs deeply through Google and may help explain why the company is embroiled in lawsuits over many of its new projects: the aggressive scanning of library books it doesn’t own; display of copyrighted material; and copyright issues connected to its acquisition of YouTube, the online video site whose popularity rests in part on the availability of pirated television and movie clips.

Google’s first employee and a number of other early hires were Jewish and, when the initial winter holiday season rolled around, a menorah rather than a Christmas tree graced the lobby. (The next year, there was a tree wrapped in Hanukkah lights.) Google’s former chef, Charlie Ayers, cooked up latkes, brisket, tzimmes and matzah ball soup for Hanukkah meals and turned the Passover seder into a Google tradition. To some, Google’s emphasis on academic achievement—hiring only the best and the brightest and employing hundreds of Ph.D.s—could be considered Jewish. So, perhaps, could “Don’t Be Evil.” With its hint of tikkun olam, the Kabbalistic concept of “repairing the world” is evident in the company’s commitment to aggressive philanthropy. Sergey and Larry have pledged $1 billion of Google’s profits to the company’s philanthropic arm, known as Google.org, which will funnel money both to nonprofit charities and companies that deal with global poverty, environmental issues and renewable energy.

Personal philanthropy is one area where Sergey intends to proceed cautiously. “I take the philosophical view that, aside from some modest stuff now, I am waiting to do the bulk of my philanthropy later, maybe in a few years, when I feel I’m more educated,” he says. “I don’t think it’s something I have had time to become an expert at.” Nevertheless, he and his parents do support a few charities. “There are people who helped me and my family out. I do feel responsible to those organizations,” he says. One of them is HIAS, the immigrant aid group that helped the Brins come to the United States. Genia serves on its board and heads its project to create a digital record of Jewish immigrant archives.

Sergey’s own Jewish sensibility is grounded in his family’s experience. “I do somewhat feel like a minority,” he says. “Being Jewish, especially in Russia, is one aspect of that. Then, being an immigrant in the U.S. And then, since I was significantly ahead in math in school, being the youngest one in a class. I never felt like a part of the majority. So I think that is part of the Jewish heritage in a way.”

Today, of course, being a young billionaire, he’s again in a class by himself. “I don’t feel comfortable being one of the crowd,” he reflects. “It’s kind of interesting—I really liked the schools that I went to, but I never rooted for the sports teams. I was never one of the crowd supporting something or not. I like to maintain my independence.”

I’m curious as to whether Sergey has been a target of anti-Semitism since he left the Soviet Union. “I’ve experienced it,” he tells me. “Usually it is fairly subtle. People harp on all media companies being run by Jewish executives, with the implication of a conspiracy.” As an example, he cites the entry about him in Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that famously accepts submissions and edits from anyone. “The Wikipedia page about me will be subtly edited in an anti-Semitic way,” he says.

He doesn’t elaborate, so I later take a look myself. Wikipedia retains the old versions of each of its pages and in that archive I find a number of occasions where people have added, moved or deleted references to Sergey’s Jewishness. Most seem harmless or ambiguous, but one jumps out. Several months ago, someone anonymously deleted a long-standing reference to the reason his parents had left Russia: “anti-Semitism.”

“I think I’m fortunate that it doesn’t really affect me personally,” Sergey says of anti-Semitism. “But there are hints of it all around. That’s why I think it is worth noting.”
Several years ago, Sergey and Larry visited a high school for gifted math students near Tel Aviv. When they came onto the stage of the darkened auditorium, the audience roared, as if they were rock stars. Every student there, many of them immigrants like Sergey from the former Soviet Union, knew of Google.

Larry took the podium first, urging the students to maintain a “healthy disregard for the impossible,” a favorite Google phrase. When it was Sergey’s turn to speak, he began, to the crowd’s delight, with a few words in Russian, which he still speaks at home with his parents.
“I have standard Russian-Jewish parents,” he then continued in English. “My dad is a math professor. They have a certain attitude about studies. And I think I can relate that here, because I was told that your school recently got seven out of the top 10 places in a math competition throughout all Israel.”

The students applauded their achievement and the recognition from Sergey, unaware that he was setting up a joke. “What I have to say,” he continued, “is in the words of my father: ‘What about the other three?’”

The students laughed. They knew where he was coming from. That Sergey has parlayed his talents and skills into unimaginable business success doesn’t mean those “standard Russian-Jewish parents” are ready to let him off the academic hook. Genia still believes that “everybody in their right mind” ought to have a doctorate, and she and Michael are not joking when they tell me that they would like to see Sergey return to Stanford and finish what he started.

Nobody disputes that, during his lifetime, JRD Tata was the most respected — and probably the most admired — businessman in India . On Thursday, as I watched the TV coverage of Ratan Tata unveiling the Tata Nano in New Delhi , I was struck by a sudden thought: Ratan has finally inherited JRD's title. He is clearly the most respected and admired businessman in India today.


And then, I thought back to that phase, 10 years ago, when the Tatas struggled to reinvent themselves in the post-JRD era. I thought of how Ratan was perceived then: awkward, untalented, unworthy of the job, out of his depth and full of vindictive anger against many of the satraps of the JRD regime. It was a time of change. New groups were springing up out of nowhere. The certainties of the old protectionist economy and the license-permit- quota raj had collapsed. Reliance had made the transition from being seen as a parvenu to being regarded as an industrial behemoth. The Infosys legend, personified by Narayan Murthy's personal simplicity and marked by the world-class skills of his high-tech partners, had just begun.


At Tata headquarters, however, the crises mounted: record losses at Tata Motors, the much-derided plan to launch the Indica, criminal charges over Tata Tea's alleged links with Assam militants, allegations of foolishness in the sale of Tata Oil Mills' assets, a plan to launch a domestic airline with Singapore Airlines that was comprehensively scuttled and more. And many of us wondered if we were watching India 's greatest industrial group diminish before our very eyes.

The house that JRD had built was crumbling. Poor, shy, inept Ratan seemed unable to cope.

And yet, a mere decade later, here was the same Ratan being feted by the world's media as the man who reinvented, if not the wheel, then certainly the motorcar. A man who did what no global carmaker believed was possible: to build a car that looked this good and drove so well for so low a price. And here was a new Ratan, his legendary shyness temporarily in remission, as he joked about calling the car the 'Pachauri' (after the environmentalist who chose to attack the Nano as a pollution threat, a charge that the Nano has easily beaten) or even the 'Mamata' (after the nutcase) or 'Despite Mamata'.

The following day, the Nano managed the impossible: there was not one negative review of note and the raves kept coming. To the chagrin of his rivals, Ratan even kept to the price commitment. Though input costs had gone up, he said, the Tata's would still price the basic Nano at a lakh because "a promise is a promise".


The triumph of the Nano was merely the crowning glory in a series of successes. Throughout the 21st century, the Tatas have beaten every doom-laden prediction and silenced every critic. Tata Motors came back from losses of over Rs 600 crore to make huge profits on the back of the Indica, the all-Indian car that had been Ratan's dream, and — to his detractors — the vanity project that would sink the company. Infosys had fulfilled its early promise but even then Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a company that had been little noticed in the 1990s, had grown to dominate the Indian IT sector, its size dwarfing Infosys. Tata Steel had defied Rusi Mody's predictions, had been whittled down to a slim and lean company, and had even gone ahead and bought Corus, a global giant, after a bidding war during which Ratan had shown nerves of steel. And even as Ratan was unveiling the world's cheapest car, the Tatas were on the verge of clinching the purchase of Jaguar, one of the world's great luxury cars.


How had so many people, who should have known better, got Ratan so wrong? Business pundits will tell you — in the kind of detail that I will never be able to master — just how the Tatas turned themselves around. I'm sure they are right. But remember, most of these pundits were the same guys who wrote Ratan off to begin with, a decade or so ago.
I have a few theories of my own — based on the interviews I have done with this otherwise reclusive man — on the remarkable rise of Ratan Tata.

Ratan realised India was changing much before the other big houses did. He recognised that the old feudal, paternalistic structure that had worked so well in the JRD era, where the old man was the emperor and the companies were run by viceroys, would not work in the new India . He professionalised the Tatas, democratised the management, abandoned the feudalism (remember Rusi Mody's massive birthday tamashas in Jamshedpur ?) and made the group adopt a low-key, matter-of-fact, get-things-done style that had no room for satraps and stars.


He saw the wisdom of embracing the future. Hence, the focus on TCS. And hence the determination to go global: we talk about Corus, the Pierre, Tetley etc, but the big successes are only the tip of the iceberg. Years ago, Ratan told me that he was determined to use Indian managerial ability and Tata capital to globalise the group. In 2000, this seemed overly ambitious and grandiose. But he has grabbed the opportunities for globalisation like no other Indian industrialist has.

At the same time, he put his faith in young India . The team behind the Nano is young — the top guy is 35 — and overwhelmingly Indian. So it was with the Indica, a truly Indian car. One of the dichotomies of Ratan's personality is that while he can be shy and reticent in social situations, he is warm, outgoing and able to motivate teams at work.


He told the government to go to hell. No group has faced more unfair governmental harassment than the Tatas — right from the Tata Tea case where they were framed by the Assam government to the telecom tangle where they were bullied by an arrogant Dayanidhi Maran. Not once did Ratan agree to pay a bribe. He wouldn't even go and complain to Manmohan Singh (who has immense respect for him). Instead, he stood his ground. If in the process, he lost a project, he lived with the loss but maintained his principles. So it has been with Mamata Banerjee's foolish Singur campaign: he will never buckle under it or try and buy her off.
He let his heart guide him. Early in his career, when Nani Palkhivala persuaded the Tatas to liquidate the Central India Mill even though it could have been turned around with an infusion of just Rs 50 lakh, an angry and disgusted Ratan gave his own annual Tata salary bonus to the officers of the company. "They were perfectly blameless people who had now lost their jobs through no fault of theirs because of a bad corporate decision. They had homes to run and children to educate," he remembered in an interview to me in 2005.


It was his heart that told him to build the Nano. He would see families of four on a single scooter. The father would keep his son in front and the mother would hold on to her baby. He wondered why it was not possible to give such families a car where they could be safe and comfortable for the same price. Plus, they would keep their dignity. There are many reasons for building a car. But this, I think, is the best one of all.
And finally, I think, India caught up with the Tatas. Over the last decade the middle class came of age, tired of the crony capitalism of the old bania class, was inspired by engineering success stories like Infosys and began to wonder why it wasn't possible for everyone to do business honestly.


The Tatas had gone through good times and bad times. But they had always given nearly all of their profits to charity. They had consistently refused to break the law and encourage corruption. Older generations of businessmen thought they were silly and shortsighted to do so considering that everybody else played the game.
But now India has changed. We finally have a strong and vocal middle class that prizes honesty above all else and that has contempt for the sleazy politicians and the crony capitalists of old.


When we see Ratan Tata refusing to pay bribes, refusing to lick politicians' boots and refusing to bend the rules — and still taking the Tatas from strength to strength, still buying the world's best companies, and still reinventing the rules of the car industry — well then, we know that there is a better way.

"I've learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success." -- Jack Welch

He is one of the world's most admired and influential business leaders. A business strategist with a great vision, his business philosophy is a lesson for businesses across the globe. Meet Jack Welch who served as chairman and CEO of General Electric (GE) from 1981-2001. He transformed an ailing organization into one of the world's best companies.

Jack Welch was born in 1935. He received his BS degree in chemical engineering from the University of Massachusetts in 1957 and his MS and PhD degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois in 1960.

1960 was a turning point in Welch's career. He joined General Electric as a chemical engineer in its 'plastics' division at a salary of $10,500 annually. He was elected the company's youngest vice president in 1972 and was named vice chairman in 1979. In April 1981, he became the 8th chairman and chief executive officer of GE.

Under his leadership, GE converted every opportunity into a business success. He gave managers a free hand in taking the right decisions which lead to faster growth and higher profits. With Welch at the helm, the company streamlined operations, acquired new businesses and made sure that every business under the GE family was among the best.
In 1980, the year before Welch became CEO, GE recorded revenues of roughly $26.8 billion. In 2000, the year before he left, the revenues stood at $130 billion. The company went from a market value of $14 billion to one of more than $410 billion at the time of his retirement, making it the most valuable and largest company in the world.

Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be." -- Jack Welch

The only child of his parents, Jack came from a working-class background in Salem, Massachusetts. His father was a railroad conductor. As a child, Jack suffered from a stuttering problem which bothered him. But his mother told him that it was because he is very clever.
It was his mother who inculcated in him leadership qualities and confidence to take on the world. "If I have any leadership style, a way of getting the best out of people," says Welch, "I owe it to my mother. She was the most influential person in my life. Grace Welch taught me the value of competition, just as she taught me the pleasure of winning and the need to take defeat in stride," Jack Welch says in his autobiography.

Jack Welch's autobiography, an international best seller -- Jack: Straight from the Gut -- gives an insight into the man who made GE one of top ranking companies in the world.

"Great people, not great strategies, are what made it all work." -- Jack Welch

From an engineer to the post of the company's CEO, it was a daunting task for Welch. He had once decided to quit the company as he expected a bigger pay hike. While many acclaimed his decisions to streamline operations, there were criticisms too.
Jack Welch was dubbed 'Neutron Jack' (in reference to the Neutron bomb) for wiping out the employees while leaving the buildings intact, but was named Manager of the Century by Fortune magazine.

Amid all this, Welch went ahead with his decisions. His main idea was to make GE 'a people company' where ideas reigned supreme. He put in place a 'boundary-less' system where people from all levels of the company could participate in innovation and problem solving.
Welch focused on four basic initiatives: globalization, services, six-Sigma, and e-business, according to his autobiography. He travelled around the world making deals work for GE. Welch made more than 600 acquisitions and moved into emerging markets. The services division grew from $8 billion in 1995 to $19 billion in 2001 under Welch's leadership.

"My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too." -- Jack Welch

He asked 4,000 managers in the company to review their staff annually. They were asked to identify the top 20 percent of staff who should be encouraged and rewarded. They were also asked to mark the 70 percent who were strong workers and lastly they were asked to list out those people whose performance needed to be improved or laid off.
'The 'vitality curve' became a model for building a 'people factory' with the greatest talent in any corporation,' says Welch in his autobiography.

Within five years, thousands of people lost their jobs and several units were shut down. While many detested his ruthless style of functioning, GE's success story was a subject of discussion among the business circles. He was acclaimed for a great management style that ensured the rise and growth of an ailing company.

# "Strong managers who make tough decisions to cut jobs provide the only true job security in today's world. Weak managers are the problem. Weak managers destroy jobs." -- Jack Welch
# An organisation's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.
# Welch professed the four E's of leadership for business success: Energy, Energize, Edge, and Execution.
# Business leaders must always be able to lead and inspire and show the path for other to follow.
# Either perform to your best or leave.
# Speed an indispensable ingredient of competitiveness.
# Managers should learn to become team players.
# Work must be fun. No one should do a job that they don't like or enjoy doing.
# Confidence spells success. A confident workforce is the backbone of a successful organisation.
# One need to be among the top to survive. Be either No.1 or 2 in the respective markets or close down.
# Only new ideas can help improve business. Focus on new ideas, he encouraged brainstorming of ideas from all sections.
# Always stick to simple messages and simpler designs which can capture the market easily.
# Change is crucial for any business. The willingness to change is a strength.
# Focus on building a great team and sharing ideas.

Warren Buffett is a man who has made millions but he also started working at his father's brokerage when he was 11 years old, that's an age when most other kids were playing hide-n-seek and didn't know how to spell 'brokerage'.

This financial wizard is by recent estimates, worth $46 billion but how he got there is the fascinating story.

It all began in the family grocery store back in Omaha. Buffett's great grandfather started the store in 1869 and it was in the Buffet family until 1969, till his uncle finally retired. But it's at this store, where he began going around his neighbourhood selling gum. This was before his stint at his father's firm.

Warren Buffett told CNBC's Liz Claman, "My grandfather would sell me Wrigley's chewing gum and I would go door to door around my neighbourhood selling it. He also sold me six Coca Cola for a quarter and I would sell it for a nickel each in the neighbourhood, so I made a small profit. I was always trying to do something like this."

From small beginnings come bigger things and so after selling gum, soft drinks and working with his father, by age 14, he had bought a 40 acres farm in Washington, Thurston County.
But he confesses that he never enjoyed the farm as much as he enjoyed investing in stocks. But the first stock he bought was "Citi Service preferred stock. I had three shares and made all of $5 on it. I had bought it at $38.25 and then I sold it around $40, it went down to $27 in between and after I sold it at $40, it went to $200!"

From that poorly timed stock sale in 1944, he learnt a lesson that became his legendary investment strategy - which is essentially - patience pays, so buy them and hold them. He figured out two other critical things about himself in the 1940s - what he is good at and what he likes to do.

This pivotal moment in his journey came in 1956, when he was just 25 years old. This man who was rejected by Harvard and now armed with contributions from family and friends and $100 of his own money starts a limited partnership with seven people.
Over the next nine years, Buffett turned a $105,000 into $26 million - a stunning 24,000 per cent increase! He had invested mostly in textile companies, farm equipment manufacturers and even a company making windmills.

Thirteen years later, Buffett forms another partnership that becomes one of the greatest teams in the history of investing. He convinces longtime friend Charlie Munger to quit his investment partnership to join Buffett as his Vice President of Berkshire Hathaway.
And now with the 82-year-old Munger, Buffett sits on top of the greatest holding companies ever.

So, it's understandable that this man is looked up to for investment and business advice all the time. But what's the secret gift he's got? How does he pick the right investments all the time? He explains, "I look for something that I can understand to start with, there are all kinds of businesses I don't understand."

He's never had anything lacking - his acute business brain has made him a lot of money. He also feels that the youth of today are living better than John D Rockefeller. His own style remains the same - he lives in the same house for 48 years, carries no cellphone, has no computer on his office desk, does not move around with an entourage.
As he puts it, "I have had everything I wanted all my life. At 20, I was having the time of my life doing what I did. Today, I'm eating the same things I always eat - burghers, fries and cherry coke. Only my clothes are more expensive now but they look cheap when I put them on!"
At 76, he married his long-time companion, Astrid Menks at a low-key ceremony at his daughter Susan's house. He is also amazingly healthy for someone on a burghers-coke diet. He's also surprisingly down to earth. He moves around freely unencumbered by a security detail. He does have a few guards with him during the annual shareholders meeting but he says he doesn't feel the need to put himself in a cocoon.

Here are some very interesting aspects of his life:

1) Warren bought his first share at age 11 and he now regrets that he started too late!
2) He bought a small farm at age 14 with savings from delivering newspapers.
3) He still lives in the same small 3 bedroom house in mid-town Omaha, that he bought after he got married 50 years ago. He says that he has everything he needs in that house. His house does not have a wall or a fence.
4) He drives his own car everywhere and does not have a driver or security people around him.
5) He never travels by private jet, although he owns the world's largest private jet company.
6) His company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns 63 companies. He writes only one letter each year to the CEOs of these companies, giving them goals for the year. He never holds meetings or calls them on a regular basis.
7) Warren Buffet has given his CEO's only two rules.
Rule number 1: Do not lose any of your share holder's money.
Rule number 2: Do not forget rule number 1.
8) He does not socialize with the high society crowd. His past time after he gets home is to make himself some pop corn and watch television.
9) Bill Gates, the world's richest man met him for the first time only 5 years ago. Bill Gates did not think he had anything in common with Warren Buffet. So he had scheduled his meeting only for half hour. But when Gates met him, the meeting lasted for ten hours and Bill Gates became a devotee of Warren Buffet.
10) Warren Buffet does not carry a cell phone, nor has a computer on his desk.
11) His advice to young people: Stay away from credit cards and invest in yourself.

He says, Remember:
A. Money doesn’t create man but it is the man who created money.
B. Live your life as simple as you are.
C. Don’t do what others say, just listen them, but do what you feel good.
D. Don’t go on brand name; just wear those things in which u feel comfortable!
E. Don’t waste your money on unnecessary things; just spend on them who really in need rather. F. After all it’s your life then why give chance to others to rule our life.”

Nationality: Indian.

Born: October 28, 1955, in Madras, India.

Education: Madras Christian College, BS, 1976; Indian Institute of Management, MBA, 1978; Yale University, master of public and private management, 1980.
Family: Married Raj K. Nooyi (management consultant); children: two.

Career: Johnson & Johnson and Mettur Beardsell, product manager; Boston Consulting Group, 1980–1986, director of international corporate strategy projects; Motorola, 1986–1988, member of automotive division development team; 1988–1990, vice president and director of corporate strategy and planning; Asea Brown Boveri, 1990–1994, senior vice president of corporate strategy and strategic marketing; PepsiCo, 1994–2001, senior vice president of corporate strategy and development; 2001–, president.

Awards: Named one of the "most powerful women in business" by Fortune magazine.

As of 2004 Indra Nooyi was the number two executive at the world's number two soft drink maker—a multinational firm that generated nearly $27 billion in sales in 2003. As the highest-ranked Indian American woman in corporate America, Nooyi led some of PepsiCo's most significant strategic moves. The crowning glory in her career was serving as lead negotiator of PepsiCo's $13.8 billion acquisition of the Quaker Oats Company, which led to her being named one of the top five officers at her company. Intensely competitive, the always unique Nooyi helped to position PepsiCo one day to overtake the longtime market leader and PepsiCo's bitter rival, the Coca-Cola Company.

DEFYING EXPECTATIONS

Raised in a middle-class family in India, Nooyi seldom did what people expected of her. Most young girls in India spent their time learning household chores; Nooyi played in an all-girl rock band and on a women's cricket team. She completed the MBA program at one of only two business schools in India and worked at Johnson & Johnson and Mettur Beardsell in India. Around the same time, a magazine advertisement for Yale School of Management caught her eye, and she impulsively applied. Much to her surprise, she was accepted. Even more surprising was the fact that her parents let her immigrate to the United States. Said Nooyi, "It was unheard of for a good, conservative, south Indian Brahmin girl to do this. It would make her an absolutely unmarriageable commodity after that" (Financial Times, January 26, 2004). After working in planning strategy at Boston Consulting Company, Motorola and Asea Brown Boveri, she joined PepsiCo as senior vice president of corporate strategy and development in 1994.

Nooyi worked directly with PepsiCo's then CEO Roger Enrico and was involved in every major strategic decision that Enrico made as CEO. One of the key executives behind the company's transformation into a focused food and beverage entity, Nooyi persistently argued for the spin-off of the company's struggling restaurant division, which included Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. Enrico was skeptical, but he finally relented. Enrico said that "Indra is like a dog with a bone" (Forbes Global, January 20, 2003).
A rabid sports fan, Nooyi spent hours studying videotapes of the final championship games that the basketball great Michael Jordan played with the Chicago Bulls; she reviewed the tapes for lessons on teamwork. Because of her desire to win, Nooyi fought hard for PepsiCo's successful $3.3 billion acquisition of Tropicana in 1998, eyeing the transaction as a vehicle to increase PepsiCo's earnings and enhance its image as a premium brand for convenient foods and drinks. A devotee of the company's orange juice, Nooyi understood before others Tropicana's brand potential, both to increase PepsiCo's earnings and to enhance the company's developing portfolio of convenience and "functional" foods and drinks. Nooyi said, "When other PepsiCo executives continued to question the $3.3 billion acquisition at a final meeting, Roger and I just told them, 'We are going to do it'" (Contra Costa Times, December 10, 2000).
In 2000 Nooyi was promoted to CFO and finished the year with four continuous quarters of uninterrupted growth—in revenues, profits, and return on capital. In December of that year, the company's stock price was up 40 percent from the year before. Nooyi described her job—and her commitment to leaving behind a lasting corporate legacy—as an "obsession." Said Nooyi, "I love my family, but PepsiCo's also my child. So really I don't look upon it as a chore. In fact, I find work very therapeutic" (Business India, January 8, 2001).

Two of Indra Nooyi's bosses at PepsiCo had significant health issues, both of which impacted Nooyi. PepsiCo CEO Wayne Calloway was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1996. Nooyi's own mentor and boss, Roger Enrico, had a history of heart trouble, which led to his retiring at age 57. Though a self-professed workaholic, Nooyi preferred to keep the mood light. "You must have fun in whatever you do. Your work takes up so much of your life that if you're not having fun, what's the point in it?" (Business India, January 8, 2001). She was known to sing around the corporate offices and keep a karaoke machine at home. Highlighting the on-the-go lifestyle that fuels demand for her company's products, she once commented that she had not realized how precious time was until she noticed a driver on the highway flossing his teeth. A devout Hindu, Nooyi went to temple and prayed regularly.

In August 2001 PepsiCo purchased the Quaker Oats Company. On the morning that the acquisition was announced, Nooyi went to temple and prayed. During the arduous negotiations, she demanded a limit on the stock price of no more than $105 a share for Quaker shareholders. According to Steven Baronoff, cohead of mergers at Merrill Lynch, which represented PepsiCo, "Throughout the whole process, she was disciplined and held very firm" (Contra Costra Times, December 10, 2000).
Adversaries underestimated Nooyi at their peril. Financial professionals greatly admired her strengths and focus. Andrew Conway, a beverage analyst with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, noted that "Indra is extraordinarily financially detailed…. With Tropicana, she was willing to take a lower-return-on-asset business because she saw a way to improve it to get strong margin growth. Her ability to find value in an acquisition is very high" (Contra Costra Times, December 10, 2000).
Integrating the two companies was an even tougher challenge—one that would be crucial to determining Nooyi's prized legacy. The integration did not go smoothly at first. The merger of the Gatorade and Tropicana sales forces resulted in a botched sales promotion, and a key Quaker Oats executive left the company. Supermarket sales of Gatorade, Quaker's crown jewel, were up only 7 percent in the last quarter of 2001 compared to the 15 percent pace set by its market peers.

But Nooyi stayed the course, and no obstacle appeared to prevent the acquisition from ultimately succeeding. PepsiCo's total sales grew nearly 7 percent in 2002, boosting the company's annual revenue growth over its historical 6 percent growth rate. In 2003 the company announced that it was on track to realize its goal of achieving $400 million in synergies by the end of fiscal year 2004. Nooyi's next move was unclear as of early 2004. Some industry insiders predicted that she would be moved to another area of the company to gain experience running her own business division. Rather than a step down, the move could ultimately catapult her to a takeover at the top. Even as one of the few women in corporate America's highest echelons, and the only Hindu woman in 2004, Nooyi had an unbeatable attitude: "I'm sure a glass ceiling exists, but it's both transparent and fragile so you can break it" (Business India, January 8, 2001).