As a memory researcher, I have long been intrigued by the phenomenon of memory failures. What are the different ways that memory can get us into trouble? Bringing together everything I knew of memory’s imperfections, lapses, mistakes and distortions, I hit on a way of thinking that helped to make things fall in place. I propose that memory’s malfunctions can be divided into seven fundamental transgressions or “sins”, which I call transience, absentmindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. Just like the ancient seven deadly sins, the memory sins occur frequently in everyday life and can have serious consequences for all of us.

Transience, absent-mindedness and blocking are sins of omission: we fail to bring to mind a desired fact, event or idea. Transience refers to a weakening or loss of memory over time. It is probably not difficult for you to remember now what you have been doing for the past several hours. But if I ask you about the same activities six weeks, six months, or six years from now, chances are you will remember less and less. Transience is a basic feature of memory, and the culprit in many memory problems.

Absent- mindedness involves a breakdown at the interface between attention and memory. Absent-minded memory errors – misplacing keys or eye-glasses, or forgetting a lunch appointment – typically occur because we are preoccupied with distracting issues or concerns, and do not focus attention on what we need to remember. The desired information is not lost over time; it is either never registered in memory to begin with, or not sought after at the moment it is needed, because attention is focused elsewhere.

The third sin, blocking, entails a thwarted search for information we may be desperately trying to retrieve. We have all failed to produce a name to accompany a familiar face. This frustrating experience happens even though we are attending carefully to the task at hand, and even though the desired name has not faded from our minds – as we become acutely aware when we unexpectedly retrieve the blocked name hours or days later.

In contrast to these three sins of omission, the next four sins of misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence are all sins of commission: some form of memory is present, but it is either incorrect or unwanted. The sin of misattribution involves assigning a memory to the wrong source: mistaking fantasy for reality, or incorrectly remembering that a friend told you a bit of trivia that you actually read about in a newspaper. Misattribution is far more common than people realize, and has potentially profound implications in legal settings. The related sin of suggestibility refers to memories that are implanted as a result of leading questions, comments, or suggestions when a person is trying to call up a past experience. Like misattribution, suggestibility is especially relevant to – and can sometimes create havoc within – the legal system.

The sin of bias reflects the powerful influences of our current knowledge and beliefs on how we remember our pasts. We often unknowingly or unconsciously edit or rewrite our previous experiences in light of what we now know or believe. The result can be a skewed rendering of a specific incident, or even an extended period of our lives, which says more about how we feel now than about what happened then.

The seventh sin – persistence – entails repeated recall of disturbing information or events that we would prefer to banish from our minds altogether: remembering what we cannot forget, even though we wish that we could. Everyone is familiar with persistence to some degree: recall the last time that you suddenly awoke at 3:00 AM, unable to keep out of your mind a painful blunder on the job or a disappointing result on an important exam. In more extreme cases of serious depression or traumatic experience, persistence can be disabling and even life-threatening.

With each passing day, it is getting easier to believe that the acceleration in India’s economic growth from around 6% to 8% is here to stay. The hard part is trying to explain why this has happened. How this is explained is important since it has a bearing on our future policy.

As per conventional wisdom, India’s growth accelerated to around 6% in the nineties from the historical rate of 3.5% because ‘reforms’ had unleashed the pent-up energies of Indian entrepreneurs long shackled by the socialist raj. It slowed subsequently because ‘reforms’ had lost momentum. The last three years’ spurt in growth is the fortuitous result of a global economic boom. Once the world economy slows down, we will be back to 6% growth – unless we proceed with ‘second generation’ reforms.

However, each of these propositions bristles with problems. It is not true that economic growth rate accelerated to 6% in the nineties. In fact, research has shown that the ‘structural break’ in India’s economic growth occurred not in the early nineties but in the eighties, when economic growth accelerated to close to 6%. The growth in the first decade after reforms was not significantly different from the growth rate in the eighties. The ‘reforms’ in the sense of market-oriented or even pro-business policies did not commence overnight in 1991, but had commenced earlier. Economic policies in the nineties merely helped consolidate an underlying trend.

Subsequently, the world economy slowed down in 2001-03, which put the brakes on Indian economy. Then came the crucial change, an acceleration to 8% in 2004-06. This cannot be ascribed to any fresh bout of ‘reforms’ or even to the global boom. There have been important structural changes in the economy. One is the rise in the saving rate from 23.5% in 2000-01 to 29.1% in 2004-05. Most of this increase has come from the turnaround in public savings. Thanks to the rise in the savings rate, the economy has moved on to an altogether higher investment rate. The second structural change is enhanced export competitiveness, reflected in the rising share of exports. The total exports (trade plus invisible receipts) / GDP ratio has risen sharply from 16.9% in 2000-01 to 24.6% in 2005-06. A third, less noticed change in recent years is financial deepening. The bank assets / GDP ratio rose from 48% in 2000-01 to 80% in 2005-06 on the back of a surge in bank credit.

One factor is common to these three structural changes: lower interest rate. The decline in interest rates has helped fiscal consolidation, it has boosted firms’ competitiveness and it has led to a huge increase in retail credit. Lower interest rates have been made possible by the rise in inflows on both current and capital accounts. The rise in inflows, in turns, reflects growing overseas confidence in India’s economic potential – confidence created by two decades of economic growth of 6%. The sharp depreciation in the rupee in the nineties undoubtedly helped but it is worth recalling that a trend towards rupee depreciation was under way in the eighties itself.

We now come to the second part of our journey under the sea. The first ended with the moving scene in the coral cemetery which left a deep impression on my mind. I could no longer content myself with the theory which satisfied Conseil. That worthy fellow persisted in seeing in the Commander of the Nautilus one of those unknown servants who return manking contempt for indifference. For him, he was a misunderstood genius who, tired of earth’s deceptions, had taken refuge in this inaccessible medium, where he might follow his instincts freely. To may mind, this explains but one side of Captain Nemo’s character. Indeed, the mystery of that last night during which we had been chained in prison, the sleep, and the precaution so violently taken by the Captain of snatching from my eyes the glass I had raised to sweep the horizon, the mortal would of the man, due to an unaccountable shock of the Nautilus, all put me on a new track. No; Captain Nemo was not satisfied with shunning man. His formidable apparatus not only suited his instinct of freedom, but perhaps also the design of some terrible retaliation.

That day, at noon, the second officer came to take the altitude of the sun. I mounted the platform, and watched the operation. As he was taking observations with the sextant, one of the sailors of the Nautilus (the strong man who had accompanied us on our first submarine excursion to the Island of Crespo) came to clean the glasses of the lantern. I examined the fittings of the apparatus, the strength of which was increased a hundredfold by lenticular rings, placed similar to those in a lighthouse, and which projected their brilliance in a horizontal plane. The electric lamp was combined in such a way as to give its most powerful light. Indeed, it was produced in vacuo, which insured both its steadiness and its intensity. This vacuum economised the graphite points between which the luminous are was developed – an important point of economy for Captain Nemo, who could not easily have replaced them; and under these conditions their waste was imperceptible. When the Nautilus was ready to continue its submarine journey, I went down to the saloon. The panel was closed, and the course marked direct west.

We were furrowing the waters of the Indian Ocean, a vast liquid plain, with a surface of 1, 200,000,000 of acres, and whose waters are so clear and transparent that any one leaning over them would turn giddy. The Nautilus usually floated between fifty and a hundred fathoms deep. We went on so for some days. To any one but myself, who had a great love for the sea, the hours would have seemed long and monotonous; but the daily walks on the platform, when I steeped myself in the reviving air of the ocean, the sight of the rich waters through the windows of the saloon, the books in the library, the compiling of my memoirs, took up all my time, and left me not a moment of ennui or weariness.

From the 21st to the 23rd of January the Nautilus went at the rate of two hundred and fifty leagues in twentyfour hours, being five hundred and forty miles, or twenty-two miles an hours. If we recognized so many different varieties of fish, it was because, attracted by the electric light, they tried to follow us; the greater part, however, were soon distanced by our speed, though some kept their place in the waters of the Nautilus for a time. The morning of the 24th, we observed Keeling Island, a coral formation, planted with magnificent cocos, and which had been visited by Mr. Darwin and Captain Fitzroy. The Nautilus skirted the shores of this desert island for a little distance. Soon Keeling Island disappeared from the horizon, and our course was directed to the north-west in the direction of the Indian Peninsula.

From Keeling Island our course was slower and more variable, often taking us into great depths. Several times they made use of the inclined planes, which certain internal levers placed obliquely to the waterline. I observed that in the upper regions the water was always colder in the high levels than at the surface of the sea. On the 25th of January the ocean was entirely deserted; the Nautilus passed the day on the surface, beating the waves with its powerful screw and making them rebound to a great height. Three parts of this day I spent on the platform. I watched the sea. Nothing on the horizon, till about four o’clock a steamer running west on our counter. Her masts were visible for an instant, but she could not see the Nautilus, being too low in the water. I fancied this steamboat belonged to the P.O. Company, which runs from Ceylon to Sydney, touching at King George’s Point and Melbourne.

At five o’clock in the evening, before that fleeting twilight which binds night to day in tropical zones, Conseil and I were astonished by a curious spectacle. It was a shoal of Argonauts traveling along on the surface of the ocean. We could count several hundreds. These graceful mollusks moved backwards by means of their locomotive tube, through which they propelled the water already drawn in. Of their eight tentacles, six were elongated, and stretched out floating on the water, whilst the other two, rolled up flat, were spread to the wing like a light sail. I saw their spiral-shaped and fluted shells, which Cuvier justly compares to an elegant skiff. For nearly an hour the Nautilus floated in the midst of this shoal of molluscs.

The next day, 26th of January, we cut the equator at the eighty-second meridian and entered the northern hemisphere. During the day a formidable troop of sharks accompanied us. They were “cestracio philippi” sharks, with brown backs and whitish bellies, armed with eleven rows of teeth, their throat being marked with a large black spot surrounded with white like an eye. There were also some Isabella sharks, with rounded snouts marked with dark spots. These powerful creatures often hurled themselves at the windows of the saloon with such violence as to make us fell very insecure. But the Nautilus, accelerating her speed, easily left the most rapid of them behind.

About seven o’clock in the evening, the Nautilus, half-immersed, was sailing in a sea of milk. At first sight the ocean seemed lactified. Was it the effect of the lunar rays? No; for the moon, scarcely two days old, was still lying hidden under the horizon in the rays of the sun. The whole sky, though lit by the sidereal rays, seemed black by contrast with the whiteness of the waters. Conseil could not believe his eyes, and questioned me as to the cause of this strange phenomenon. Happily I was able to answer him.

“It is called a milk sea,” I explained. “A large extent of white wavelets often to be seen on the coasts of Amboyna, and in these parts of the sea.

“But, sir,” said Conseil, “can you tell me what causes such an effect? For I suppose the water is not really turned into milk.”

“No, my boy’ and the whiteness which surprises you is caused only by the presence of myriads of luminous little worm, gelatinous and without colour, of the thickness of a hair, and whose length is not more than seven-thousandths of an inch. These insects adhere to one another sometimes for several leagues.”

“Several leagues!” exclaimed Conseil.

“Yes, my boy; and you need not try to compute the number of these infusoria. You will not be able, for, if I am not mistaken, ships have floated on these milk seas for more than forty miles.”

Towards midnight the sea suddenly resumed its usual colour; but behind us, even to the limits of the horizon, the sky reflected the whitened waves, and for a long time seemed impregnated with the vague glimmerings of an aurora borealis.

Turning the business around involved more than segmenting and pulling out of retail. It also meant maximizing every strength we had in order to boost our profit margins. In reexamining the direct model, we realized that inventory management was not just a core strength; it could be and incredible opportunity for us, and one that had not yet been discovered by any of competitors.

In Version 1.0 of the direct model, we eliminated the reseller, thereby eliminating the markup and the cost of maintaining a store. In Version 1.1, we went one step further to reduce inventory inefficiencies. Traditionally, a long chain of partners was involved in getting a product to the customer. Let’s say you have a factory building a PC we’ll call model #4000. The system is then sent to the distributor, which sends it to the warehouse, which sends it to the dealer, who eventually pushes it on to the consumer by advertising, “I’ve got model #4000. Come and buy it.” If the consumer says, “But I want model #8000,” the dealer replies, “Sorry, I only have model #4000.” Meanwhile, the factory keeps building model #4000s and pushing the inventory into the channel.

The result is a glut of model #4000s that nobody wants. Inevitably, someone ends up with too much inventory, and you see big price corrections. The retailer can’t sell it at the suggested retail price, so the manufacturer loses money on price protection (a practice common in our industry of compensating dealers for reductions in suggested selling price). Companies with long, multi-step distribution systems will often fill their distribution channels with products in an attempt to clear out older technologies or meet their financial targets. This dangerous and inefficient practice is called “channel stuffing”. Worst of all, the customer ends up paying for it by purchasing systems that are already out of date.

Because we were building directly to fill our customers’ orders, we didn’t have finished goods inventory devaluing on a daily basis. Because we aligned our suppliers to deliver components as we used them, we were able to minimize raw material inventory. Reductions in component costs could be passed on tour customers quickly, which made them happier and improved our competitive advantage. It also allowed us to deliver the latest technology to our customers faster than our competitors.

The direct model turns conventional manufacturing inside out. Conventional manufacturing dictates that you should always have a stockpile of raw materials, because if you run out, your plant can’t keep going. But if you don’t know what you need to build because of dramatic changes in demand, you run the risk of ending up with terrific amount of excess and obsolete inventory. That is not the goal. The concept behind the direct model has nothing to do with stockpiling and everything to do with information. The quality of your information is inversely proportional to the amount of assets required, in this case excess inventory. With less information about customer needs, you need massive amounts of inventory. So, if you have great information – that is, you know exactly what people want and how much – you need that much less inventory. Less inventory, of course, corresponds to less inventory depreciation. In the computer industry, component prices are always falling as suppliers introduce faster chips, bigger disk drives, and modems with ever-greater bandwidth. Let’s say that Dell has six days of inventory. Compare that to an indirect competitor who has twenty-five days of inventory with another thirty in their distribution channel. That’s a difference of forty-nine days, and in forty-nine days, the cost of materials will decline about 6 percent.

Then there’s the threat of getting stuck with obsolete inventory if you’re caught in a transition to a nextgeneration product, as we were with those memory chips in 1989. As the product approaches the end of its life, the manufacturer has to worry about whether it has too much in the channel and whether a competitor will dump products, destroying profit margins for everyone. This is a perpetual problem in the computer industry, but with the direct model, we have virtually eliminated it. We know when our customers are ready to move on technologically, and we can get out of the market before its most precarious time. We don’t have to subsidize our losses by charging higher prices for other products.

And ultimately, our customer wins. Optimal inventory management really starts with the design process. You want to design the product so that the entire product supply chain, as well as the manufacturing process, is oriented not just for speed but for what we call velocity. Speed means being fast in the first place. Velocity means squeezing time out of every step in the process.

Inventory velocity has become a passion for us. To achieve maximum velocity, you have to design your products in a way that covers the largest part of the market with the fewest number of parts. For example, you don’t need nine different Disk drives when you can serve 98 percent of the market with only four. We also learned to take into account the variability of low-cost and high-cost components. Systems were reconfigured to allow for a greater variety of low-cost parts and a limited variety of expensive parts. The goal was to decrease the number of components to manage, which increased the velocity, which decreased the risk of inventory depreciation, which increased the overall health of our business system.

We were also able to reduce inventory well below the levels anyone thought possible by constantly challenging and surprising ourselves with the results. We had our internal skeptics when we first started pushing for ever-lower levels of inventory. I remember the head of our procurement group telling me that this was like “flying low to the ground 300 knots.” He was worried that we wouldn’t see the trees.

In 1993, we had $2.9 billion in sales and $220 million in inventory. Four years later, we posted $12.3 billion in sales ad had inventory of 33 million. We’re now down to six days of inventory and we’re starting to measure it in hours instead of days. Once you reduce your inventory while maintaining your growth rate, a significant amount of risk comes from the transition from one generation of product to the next. Without traditional stockpiles of inventory, it is critical to precisely time the discontinuance of the older product line with the ramp-up in customer demand for the newer one. Since we were introducing new products all the time, it became imperative to avoid the huge drag effect from mistakes made during transitions. E

My comrade and I had been quartered in Jamaica, and from there we had been drafted off to the British settlement of Belize, lying away West and North of the Mosquito coast. At Belize there had been great alarm of one cruel gang of pirates (there were always more pirates than enough in those Caribbean Seas), and as they got the better of our English cruisers by running into out-of-the-way creeks and shallows, and taking the land when they were hotly pressed, the governor of Belize had received orders from home to keep a sharp look-out for them along shore. Now, there was an armed sloop came once a year from Port Royal, Jamaica, to the Island, laden with all manner of necessaries, to eat, and to drink, and to wear, and to use in various ways; and it was aboard of that sloop which had touched at Belize, that I was standing, leaning over the bulwarks.

The Island was occupied by a very small English colony. It had been given the name of Silver-Store. The reason of its being so called, was, that the English colony owned and worked a silver-mine over on the mainland, in Honduras, and used this Island as a safe and convenient place to store their silver in, until it was annually fetched away by the sloop. It was brought down from the mine to the coast on the backs of mules, attended by friendly local people and guarded by white men; from thence it was conveyed over to Silver-store, when the weather was fair, in the canoes of that country; from Silver-Store, when the weather was fair, in the canoes of that country; from Silver-Store, it was carried to Jamaica by the armed sloop once a – year, as I have already mentioned; from Jamaica, it went, of course, all over the world.

How I came to be aboard the armed sloop, is easily told. Four-and-twenty marines under command of a lieutenant – that officer’s name was Lidgerwood – had been told off at Belize, to proceed to Silver-Store, in aid of boats and seamen stationed there for the chase of the Pirates. The Island was considered a good post of observation against the pirates, both by land and sea; neither the pirate ship nor yet her boats had been seen by any of us, but they had been so much heard of, that the reinforcement was sent. Of that party, I was one. It included a corporal and a sergeant. Charker was corporal, and the sergeant’s mane was Drooce. He was the most tyrannical non-commissioned officer in His Majesty’s service.

The night came on, soon after I had the foregoing words with Charker. All the wonderful bright colours went out of the sea and sky in a few minutes, and all the stars in the Heavens seemed to shine out together, and to look down at themselves in the sea, over one another’s shoulders, millions deep.

Next morning, we cast anchor off the Island. There was a snug harbour within a little reef; there was a sandy beach; there were cocoa-nut trees with high straight stems, quite bate, and foliage at the top like plumes of magnificent green feathers; there were all the objects that are usually seen in those parts, and I am not going to describe them, having something else to tell about.

Great rejoicings, to be sure, were made on our arrival. All the flags in the place were hoisted, all the guns in the place were fired, and all the people in the place came down to look at us. One of the local people had come off outside the reef, to pilot us in, and remained on board after we had let go our anchor.

My officer, Lieutenant Linderwood, was as ill as the captain of the sloop, and was carried ashore, too. They were both young men of about my age, who had been delicate in the West India climate. I thought I was much fitter for the work than they were, and that if all of us had our deserts, I should be both of them rolled into one. (It may be imagined what sort of an officer of marines I should have made, without the power of reading a written order. And as to any knowledge how to command the sloop-Lord! I should have sunk her in a quarter of an hour!)

However, such were my reflections; and when we men were ashore and dismissed, I strolled about the place along with Charker, making my observations in a similar spirit.

It was a pretty place; ;in all its arrangements partly South American and partly English, and very agreeable to look at on that account, being like a bit of home that had got chipped off and had floated away to that spot, accommodating itself to circumstances as it drifted along. The huts of the local people, to the number of five-and-twenty, perhaps, were down by the beach to the left of the anchorage. On the right was a sort of barrack, with a South American Flag and the Union Jack, fling from the same staff, where the little English colony could all come together, if they saw occasion. It was a walled square of building, with a sort of pleasure-ground inside, and inside that again a sunken block like a powder magazine, with a little square trench round it, and steps down to the door.

Charker and I were looking in at the gate, which was not guarded; and I had said to Charker, in reference to the bit like a powder magazine, “That’s where they keep the silver you;” and Charker had said to me, after thinking it over, “And silver ain’t gold. Is it, Gill?”

Line: From the every beginning TCL (Tata Chemicals Ltd.) has successfully grown by meeting consumer requirements in a mutually beneficial way. To determine its benchmark, it uses its own ‘Customer Requirements Determination Process (CRDP)’ where unit explores present and future customer requirements to enable them to

(5) incorporate those in their business offering. This process starts with listening to end-users by exploring various customer listening information sources. This information captures various expectations of customers. Next step starts with identification of segments and matching of segment wise expectations. Outcome of this exercise gives enough guidelines about new business scopes and grey areas of current

(10) business practices, After validation of customer expectations through cross checking, TCL matches its internal resources and skill sets with external opportunities and threats to address attractive business avenues. Launch of Tata Kisan Sansar was an outcome to that to offer all sort of end-to end agree solutions of farmers.
Agriculture today contribute a lot of the development of Indian economy with

(15) an employment share of around 69 percent of the work force and with a contribution of near about 24 percent of the GDP of the country. Indian agriculture sector has its importance in economic growth but value addition in this sector in terms of earning capacity is decreasing because of greater income streams form industry and services sectors. The continuous expanding of the gap in per

(20) capita income between the agriculture and non-agriculture sectors has huge economic ad social implications and it is almost necessary to empower the farmers financially by enriching the source of income. In this backdrop, one of the motivations for TCL to start ‘Tata Kisan Sansar (TKS)’ was to ensure business by empowering agri-product producers. again TCL felt that due to its business nature of

(25) manufacturing and marketing commodities, it developed an image of a purely product centrie organization. TCL’s internal research substantiated its feeling and it recognized a paradigm shift towards a customer centric organization.
TCL first started ‘Tata Kisan Kendra’ in 1988, executive franchised retail outlets of ‘Tata with the objective of proving ‘one-stop agri input shop’ to the farmers. With the

(30) marketing function being transferred from Rallis to tata chemicals, TCL used the Tata Kisan Kendras (TKKS) more extensively to market their products. It was understood by the company that the range of offering under the TKKS offered an attractive basket of benefits to the farmers. The business model of the TKKs was base on offering a complete set of inputs to the farmer. Along with this, it also offered

(35) extension services and technology inputs to help farmers plan their crops. At that time it dealt more with offering fertilizers and other inputs form those centers. Over the time it realized the job is half done because requirement of a farmer is multi-layered. To offer more holistic services it changed “Tata Kisan Kendra” as ‘Tata mulit-layered. To offer a more holistic services it changed “Tata Kisan Kendra’ as ‘Tata Kisan Sansar’ and repositioned it as ‘one-stop farmers solution shop’ by offering entire

(40) range of agri services including quality agri input products. Objective was to empower farmers by providing them information about better agronomic practices, facilitating farm credit and providing quality agri inputs from a single source.