The Kings Of Jaipur

(via Couture International Jeweler, Spring 2007) Victoria Gomelsky writes:

Motorized rickshaws, mopeds, hand-drawn carts an cows dominate the relentless traffic on Jaipur’s dusty M.I.Road, except for the block that houses the esteemed Gem Palace, where tour buses are a conspicuous and everyday presence.

The retail store—a Jaipur institution since 1852, when the maharaja who ruled the city, capital of India’s Rajasthan province, appointed Kasliwal family crown jewelers—conjures images of such fabulousness among visitors that it is now a regular stop on the tourist circuit, like the pink-honeycombed Palace of the Winds and hilltop Amber Fort. Credit goes to eighth-generation Munnu Kasliwal, the creative genius behind Gem Palace’s treasure trove, and his brothers, Sudhir and Sanjay, who manage the retail and wholesale ends of the business along with their cousins, Ajay and Pappu Kasliwal. Even the ninth generation is represented, the form of Munnu’s son, Siddarth, who recently joined the business. Under the family’s careful stewardship, Gem Palace earns as much respect from contemporary jewel-lovers as it did under the majarajas’ patronage.

“It the mother lode,” confirms a well-groomed American woman, cooing over a pair of carnelian earnings and matching ring on a sunny December afternoon. She’s a media buyer from Maryland on a two-week holiday with her husband in Rajasthan. A visit to Gem Palace was built in their itinerary, making them the latest in a long line of admirers to gawk over the gem-set wonders stocked inside its aging wooden showcases.

Few retailers can claim Jackie Onassis, Bill Clinton, Mick Jagger, Nicole Kidman, Giorgio Armani, Countess Mountbatten of Burma and Diana, Princess of Wales as fans. Then again, few retailers offer visitors an opportunity to purchase baubles in an environment that recalls an era in which jewelry was valued above all other material possessions. Located in a centuries-old Jaipur building with a central courtyard and flat-roof terraces distinguished by Mughal-style minarets, Gem Palace is a veritable museum of Rajasthani craftsmanship, from the mustard-color block prints that blanket the walls, withered and peeling with age, to the carved silver elephants and jeweled objects d’art that litter the floor beneath the showcases, themselves brimming with antique and contemporary interpretations of traditional Indian motifs.

There are spectacular villandi, or Mughal-cut, diamond necklaces, the diamonds flat as cobblestones and almost as large; traditional bell earrings known as jhoomki strung with Burmese rubies, like tiny gem-set parasols; gold cuff lotus flower bracelets laced with pink and green tourmalines; 22-karat gold and diamond rings fashioned in the shape of parakeets, with colorless diamond briolettes swinging from their gilded beaks. The range of jewels includes the eccentric (a 32-piece gold and diamond chess set, anyone?) and the imperial (a Mughal turban ornament known as sarpech is set with pink and purple spinels and is as long as child’s forearm), but there’s a healthy selection of more affordable baubles in rose quartz, moonstone and other semi precious stones, sourced as rough from the hundreds of dealers who congregate inside the walls of the old city.

What’s more, the jewelry on display at Gem Palace is breathtaking down to the details hidden from view. Following the Hindu belief that the body sees what the eyes cannot, the back of Mannu’s creations bear extraordinary detailing, including delicate filigree work, diamond accents and vivid pastoral scenes rendered in red and green enamel, a style known as kundan meena. Gem Palace is also one of the chief practitioners of an ancient Indian gold working technique called kundan, in which precious stones are set into 24-karat gold with a core of lac, a natural resin, the inlay forming a shiny ribbon around each stone.

Beyond the sensory pleasures of touring Gem Palace lies the significant intellectual reward of seeing and touching historical evidence that connects the store to its magnificent home city, founded by ruler Jai Singh in 1727. The salon’s wooden chairs, carved from Burmese teak, look like they could have supported the backside of a Mughal King, and probably did. Against the wall, a stack of 100-year old, poster-size black-and-white prints depict the annual mystic extravaganza that is the Pushkar camel fair. Ornate silver trunks lined in red velvet store historic-gem-encrusted flasks originally crafted for the Singh dynasty. Such touches lend the store an antique atmosphere that belies the whirl of activity going on upstairs and at select location around Jaipur.

“We don’t outsource anything,” says Sudhir Kasliwal, as he leads a visitor through the warren of rooms that constitute the main selling floor. “We have our workers working in their homes for pieces. But everything is done by our staff. This is one place where we do everything, right from cutting and polishing stones to setting. That’s why we can design something and don’t have to look here and there for the stones. Instead, we cut our own.”

Gem Palace employs several thousand people, all under the direction of Munnu, a 49-year old artist whose flair with gemstones is such that London’s Gilbert Collection at Somerset House assembled 250 pieces of his work for a month long exhibition last fall. “Treasures from the Gem Palace” was the brainchild of Harry Fane, an authority on Cartier who grew close to the Kasliwal family over the course of numerous research visits to India.

“The show had 7400 visitors in one day while the Tiffany show across the way attracted 600, so you can see the amount of interest that people in Europe had in us,” Sudhir says, as he walks past a shiny 1912 Mercedes parked in back of the store, one of the numerous vintage cars that make up his personal collection.

Even among the private lives of Jaipur’s citizens, the past is perpetually present. When Jai Singh built this “Pink City”, known for the dusty pink stucco walls that surround the old quarter, he invited artisans from all over the country to move here, part of his campaign to make Jaipur India’s first planned city. Then, as now, the Johari Bazaar, or jeweler’s market, teemed with gem cutters and traders bartering for the best prices on colored stones.

That foundation helped cement Jaipur’s standing as the epicenter of the gemstone trade, a reputation that continues to this day. In the 2005-2006 fiscal year, India imported $110 million in rough colored stones and exported $235 million. Eighty to 90 percent of those gems filtered through Jaipur, says Gaurav Joshi, the assistant director of the Jaipur office of Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council, a quasi-governmental agency charged with promoting India’s gem and jewelry industry.

While emerald and tanzanite are processed in mass quantities here, so, too, are stones from all the corners of the gem world: moonstones from Sri Lanka, tsavorites from East Africa, tourmalines from Brazil, rubies from Burma. To the delight of jewelry connoisseurs the world over, Munnu uses all of them.

But those who can’t make the trek to India to peruse the selection are welcome to schedule a viewing in New York, where Gem Palace recently opened a by-appointment-only salon in a charming brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The company—familiar to patrons of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Barneys, two venues that regularly sell Munnu’s jewels—chose New York for its first showroom outside of India to augment its fast-rising reputation, bolstered in recent months by fawning coverage in The New York Times, Robb Report and Time Style & Design, among other publications.

In addition to the increased international presence, Munnu’s work—now leaning toward a fusion of Art Deco and rose-cut diamond designs featuring his favorite stones, old Golconda diamonds—also appears in the Diamond Information Center’s new right-hand ring campaign. Women of the world, you know what to do.

On Beryllium Agreement

On March 14, 2007, representatives of the Thai Gem and Jewelry Traders Association (TGJTA) and Japan Jewelry Association (JJA) announced an agreement regarding the disclosure of beryllium (Be) treatments in corundum. Other signatories were the Thai Department of Export Promotion (DEP) of the Thai Ministry of Commerce; the Gem and Jewelry Institute of Thailand (GIT); and the Chanthaburi Gem and Jewelry Traders Association (CGA).

The memorandum states that exporters of loose corundum must disclose the treatment on invoices using the following terminology:

Non- Be-Treated
Be Treated
Unconfirmed Be Treatment

Get Shorty

Memorable quote (s) from the movie:

Chili Palmer (John Travolta): Leo, sit down. I don't know how you got this far, you're so fucking dumb. But you're through now, and let me explain why. Ray Bones is the man that you're dealing with now, and when Bones finds out what you did, he's gonna take everything, including the sporty little hat you got on your head. And then most likely he'll shoot you, so you won't tell on him. Now, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna hurt you. Now you got three hundred and ten thousand in the bag here. I'm gonna take the three hundred thousand that you scammed from the airline, and then the ten that's left over, I'm gonna borrow from you and pay back at another time.

Leo (David Paymer): Wait, you take all my money, but you're borrowing part of it?

Chili Palmer (John Travolta): At eighteen percent. Now don't ask another fucking question, I'm leaving.

The Art Of Catching Early Signals On Threats and Opportunities

(via TNN, April 10, 2007) Neelima Mahajan writes:

Intel’s Andy Grove made paranoia fashionable way back in 1996. A few years back at a conference at the Wharton School of Business, Grove made a statement: “Snow melts at the edge,” he famously said. Those words struck a chord with Wharton professor George S Day, whose research is all about scanning the environment for potential opportunities and threats.

Says Day, "A snow bank always retreats at the edge because that’s where it is exposed the most.” It’s pretty much the same for organizations, he avers. There are enough weak signals at the periphery that most people choose to ignore. And that can make all the difference between success and failure.

Living on edge
But before we get into that, what does he mean by the ‘periphery’ or the edge? “It’s the blurred zone at the edge of the organization,” he says. To give an example, take an Indian company—say, one like Infosys—which is making moves in markets like Europe or the US. A weak signal from the periphery could mean that a sales manager in the US hears a rumor about a potential competitor in India.

But there are several problems with these signals. The first thing being that since they are weak anyway, it is hard for one to pick them up and understand their implications. Remember 9/11? After studying the tragedy, the 9/11 Commission said that they had all the data they needed to avert it, but they failed to connect the dots. “This is a consistent story with companies that miss an opportunity or are late to react to a threat,” says Day. “It’s not that they didn’t know about it, but that the information was scattered.”

The second problem is that weak signals are rarely brought to the notice of a leadership team. In his research with his colleague Paul J H Shoemaker which later culminated in a book titled Peripheral Vision, Day found that in almost all these cases, there were people in the organization or the network who knew about a past surprise, but the management didn’t know that they knew.” “The people didn’t realize that the management needed to know in the first place,” says Day.

Let’s take this American company that does a lot of work in advanced materials and has laboratories in Europe. Now Europe has regulation called Reduction of Hazardous Substances which impacts product design dramatically. “The European technologists knew all about this but just didn’t tell anyone in the US. When it came to design of a new generation project, they discovered that they do not comply with these new regulations,” says Day. They paid heavily for that: the company lost between $20 million to $30 million because they were late in picking up the signals.

Peripheral vision—or the lack of it—is an even more important issue in today’s globalized world. “Your potential competitors and markets are no longer regional or country level: they are global,” says Day. The communication revolution—especially the internet—also adds to this. “For instance, blogs are becoming a major source of customer information and complaints. With the development of new technology, markets are much more fragmentary and harder to understand,” says Day.

In a nutshell, peripheral vision is about scanning, interpreting and, most importantly, acting. Remember the low carb diet revolution in the US? The trend caught on like fire, lasted for a bit and then vanished. There were a clutch of companies that caught the trend early on and introduced products even before it had fully set in. But there were others who were less fortunate. “About 3000 new products were launched after the low carb diet started to decline in popularity. One particular company was ruined with losses in excess of $200 million. They did see the market early enough but they were late in capitalizing on it,” says Day.

The right filters
But clearly, just detecting weak signals is not enough. Because there are hundreds and millions of them, it is not worthwhile to focus on every blip, you see. “One of the things that people are concerned about is there is so much happening at the periphery that’s confusing and overwhelming,” says Day. “We don’t propose that you have to pay attention to each and every weak signal.”

Sure, it’s not easy: weak signals of threats and opportunities are pretty hard to distinguish in noise and clutter. “The best practice companies really look at the signals and then focus on a few key questions. They sculpt out where they are going to work,” says Day.

Take for instance, Medtronic, a company that makes pacemakers defibrillators. “It can always be at risk from drugs that could perform the same function as pacemakers. So they put together a taskforce of people that ask the same questions: what drug developments can impact our business? Once they get those weak signals, they can collect them, interpret them and be focused on them and then decide what to do,” says Day.

But for organizations that don’t have this capability, how can they go about developing it? It starts with the guys at the top, says Day. Vigilant leaders, as Day calls them, help put in place a warning system by encouraging people to talk to them.

Grove was very anxious that people in far-flung parts of the organization bring him their concerns. That’s not true of most other organizations,” says Day. Besides, they signal their commitment to this by continuously asking questions about the edge. They also encourage mavericks. “These are smart people who are not usually accepted by the organization because they are always challenging everything,” says Day.

Besides, by their very nature, such leaders are curious, imaginative and externally oriented. They go about seeking diverse viewpoints. “We as an industry spend too much time talking to mutual resources. So you go to the same trade meetings, read the same magazines. Vigilant leaders tend to have a much broader network and access to other parts of the environment,” says Day. “Such leaders are much better at figuring out uncertainity. They don’t avoid it. They work a lot at internalizing.”

Part of what such leaders do is that they provide a supportive climate. “They allow time for people to explore the periphery,” says Day. They do all sorts of things for that: like create a taskforce, create a small group to scan the environment, set up a council to look at the trends on a regular basis. So while a company like Medtronic creates taskforces focused on questions, others like IBM have a full time crows nest. In other words, some people sitting up in a crow’s nest high in a tree whose job is to continuously scan.

Yet other companies resort to scenario planning. All of us are familiar with Enron which was very successful in the late 1990s—and then went bust. Enron Federal Credit Union (Enron FCU is now called Star Federal Credit Union), which served Enron’s employees, was into scenario planning. Even before Enron’s collapse became imminent, they had explored several possible scenarios, including one called ‘starting over’, which meant that they would have to expand their member base. When the collapse happened, Enron FCU quickly sent out customized mails to reassure former and current Enron employees that their deposits were safe. Today Enron has vanished, yet Enron Credit Union is still going strong.

Clearly, the phrase ‘living on the edge’ seems to have acquired a whole new meaning.

Thinkers 50

(via Times of India, April 10, 2007)

Launched in 2001, the Thinkers 50 is the world’s first ranking of business and management gurus. In a run to 2007 rankings, TOI will exclusively run profiles of those in the fray. If you have an opinion on who should figure in the list, you can vote on http://www.thinkers50.com

Ranked 21 in last year’s Thinkers 50, Clayton Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. His research and writing interests focus on managing technological innovation and locating new markets for leading-edge technologies. He is the author of the management classic The Innovator’s Dilemma. The crux of his argument was that disruptive new technologies could cause even well-established companies to fall. “The criteria that managers use to make the decisions that keep their present businesses healthy make it impossible for them to do the right thing for their future,” he says. Part of the reason for this blinkered view is that companies tend to focus on listening closely to their ‘lead’ customers that will help them in their current business. Unfortunately, that prevents them from foreseeing future challenges. “If you only blindly listen to the leading customers of the current set that you listen to then you won’t see innovations that will take root amongst the other set,” says Christensen.

After the runaway success of his first book, Christensen followed it up with a second book titled The Innovator’s Solution which looked at the other side: how companies can create disruptions rather than being destroyed by them. His most recent book, titled Seeing What’s Next, says it is possible to predict which companies will win and which will lose in a specific situation. The best tribute to Chistensen’s work came from Inc Magazine which said, “Just as kids await the latest Harry Potter installment, so do business leaders look for Clayton M Chistensen’s next offering.”

A New Kind Of Love

Memorable quote (s) from the movie:

Steve Sherman (Paul Newman): Here's to all the bachelors in the world. May our tribe increase.

Harry (Marvin Kaplan): How?

Steve Sherman (Paul Newman): Automation.

Angela Belcher: Bioengineer

(via Time, April 9, 2007) Michael D Lemonick writes:

Nano knowledge studying abalone shells led Belcher to batteries made of viruses. An M.I.T polymath uses genetic engineering to make a better car battery out of viruses.

The reason we aren’t all driving electric cars has little to do with a Detroit conspiracy. It’s that nobody has invented a lightweight, inexpensive battery that can store enough electricity to make such a vehicle practical.

If anyone can change that, it’s Angela Belcher. A materials scientist and bioengineer at M.I.T., Belcher, 49, won a MacArthur Foundation genius grant in 2004, and last fall Scientific American named her research leader of the year for her current project: creating an entirely new kind of battery, not by building it but by growing it. Working with several M.I.T colleagues, Belcher has engineered a virus, known as M13 bacteriophage, that latches onto and coats itself with bits of inorganic materials, including gold and cobalt oxide. That turns each long, tubular virus into what amounts to a minuscule length of wire. Coax these nanowires to line up, and you have the components of a battery that is far more compact and powerful than anything available.

If her battery works as a commercially viable product, that alone could qualify Belcher as a climate change hero, but her vision is green in other ways as well. Conventional batteries generate a lot of waste during manufacture, and they are a disposal nightmare. But a viral battery essentially grows itself, using water as a solvent, so there’s practically no waste. And since much of its relatively small bulk is organic, the battery is partly biodegradable.

Belcher has been tackling a whole new field of science every five years (so far, she has mastered materials science, biochemistry, molecular biology and electrical engineering). Considering her track record, the next thing she decides to study could well lead to yet another remarkable breakthrough.

The Gem Producing Potential Of Somaliland—A New Sri Lanka?

(via Gem & Jewellery News, Vol.8, No.4, September 1999) Judith Kinnaird writes:

My visit to Somaliland had not started well. I had arrived on an ECHO flight from Nairobi (EC Humanitarian Organization) and had landed in Hargeisa, the capital, along with about eight other people of assorted nationalities bound for a peace conference.

Unfortunately, the normal rota for the plane that day would have been for it to land in Berbera on the Gulf Coast, which was where my visa was waiting but, because of the conference delegates, that day it had come to the capital instead. A four hour delay then occurred at the airport whilst ‘Mr Fixit’, my mentor, was found. This gave me the opportunity to learn about the country from the various officials who felt it important to keep me company during my sojourn in the VIP lounge whilst visa formalities got sorted.

The discovery of gemstones in Somaliland and their subsequent extraction only began in 1990. The widespread distribution and broad range of gemstones available makes it all the more surprising that gemstones have come to light so recently. My visit to Somaliland had been arranged to consider the small scale mining potential in the country as part of an EC programme to investigate the sustainable exploitation of natural resources. The gemological potential may provide an important income generation in a country where many will earn only $10 per month, not necessarily because of their primitive state, but more as a consequence of a bruising civil war.

Difficulties
Visits to various gemstone producing areas proved quite difficult as many of them are only reached by tracks little better than the bed of dried up stream, resulting in bone-shaking journeys which might take five hours to do 50 miles. Also, the Ministry of Water and Minerals did not want me to visit any private sector producers without being accompanied by a person from the Ministry, and groups in the private sector showed considerable reluctance to accept a Ministry representative since most had not paid for a license for mineral working. Eventually, most of the initial problems were solved and I traveled extensively round the country, particularly in the north east from Sheikh to Berbera on the coast where the temperature was in excess of 40°C (and that was in the winter) and Borama in the west, which is the center for emerald production.

Numerous varieties
Once people knew that I was interested in gemstones everywhere I went I was inundated by collectors and traders who wanted to sell me their goods. Among more than forty different mineral species produced, were a variety of gemstones varying from emerald, ruby, sapphire, and aquamarine, to minerals like garnet and amethyst, some of which were of considerable size and excellent color. Other gems like phenakite, alexandrite and heliodor were reported though not seen, and it was unwise to place too reliance on local gem identification. This is not due to unscrupulous behavior on the part of most producers and traders, rather a lack of knowledge as they begin to learn to identify gemstones.

Thus of occurrences reported as tanzanite, one turned out to be of purple fluorite the other purple of vesuvianite. Similarly, one locality believed to produce emerald, whilst right in the middle of rich pegmatite belt, was found to contain bright green quartz colored by secondary copper minerals between the quartz crystals. Green epidote and diopside are frequently thought to be tourmaline or peridot.

One group told me they were working green garnet. Although the rocks were of the right composition for potential finds of green garnet, the mineral they thought was green garnet was largely epidote, although scapolite, green amphibole and orange hessonite garnets also occurred, and we did indeed succeed in finding one tiny green garnet. Despite the disappointment of sometimes having to tell people that the minerals they were mining were worthless, there were some localities with exciting potential. In one area, the mineral believed to be tourmaline was in fact epidote, although it was accompanied by blue zoisite which, if found in sufficiently large pieces could have some value.

In conversation with a very impressive lawyer in Hargeisa, I was told that gemstones are also being produced in the Bossaso area on the coast in the far northeast, which is consistent with the geology shown on the geological map of Somalia. He also maintained that the gemstones which are appearing from Garowe to the east have been robbed from ancient graves dating back as far as the civilizations of Egypt. He also believed that some of the gemstones referred to in the bible had their origin in Somaliland.

Diamonds
Unfortunately there is a widespread belief among the people of Somaliland that there is an abundance of diamonds in the country. This is based on the mis-identification of quartz by a few locals and traders. These men have ‘diamond testers’ which they believe distinguish diamonds from other stones on account of its hardness. The testers being used are the sort that are specifically designed to distinguish diamonds set in jewelry and were made to show a hardness of ten for quartz crystals, whilst some minerals were shown to have a hardness of anything up to 12. The commonly occurring concentrations of small quartz crystals are called ‘sugar diamonds’ by these traders.

On one occasion, following an afternoon studying an extensive outcrop of water clear rock crystal near the Dabail Weina (a locality from which 200 tons of piezo-electric quartz had been extracted from a 5m deep trench during 1977-78), my driver, myself and guide were arrested and taken to prison, because the locals had reported we had stolen their diamonds. Fortunately, a permit from the Ministry of Minerals, which stated that we were on government business was reluctantly accepted.

The miners
Some groups of gem producers gem producers comprise half-a-dozen men, while others are moderately well-organized with more than twenty workers. Typically all the groups are extracting gemstones from hard rock with the minimum of tools. In addition, one group near Heinweina had no camping equipment, yet they stayed on the mountain for four or five nights at a time because their aquamarine mine is 8 km from the village and more than 500 m up in rough mountainous terrain. All groups face the same problems of lack of equipment, lack of access to overseas markets, lack of capital to travel to foreign gem trade fairs, lack of any central display and exhibition center to attract the attention of the many foreign visitors to the country, lack of knowledge on relevant mining equipment and how to use it, and often the most basic problems of difficulty of identification of even the common minerals.

Buying gems
Gems for sale are not readily obtained, and it is necessary to become acquainted with producers on a personal basis to get good material, although the Somalis are currently in the process of setting up a gemological association in the capital Hargeisa. Once this association has been established it will form a focus for the collection and trading of gemstones and mineral specimens. I did visit one authorized dealer of gemstones in Hargeisa who buys stones from producers and says he also owns a gold prospect. He had a variety of minerals on display, most of which were of dubious quality. He also tried to persuade me to buy some mercury which he says is ‘dripping out of rocks’ in an unspecified locality. Later my mentor suggested that it is more likely from Russian missiles which are remnants of the war.

Among the more enterprising businessmen, one young man showed me more than a hundred Somalia gemstones cut in Ethiopia, for which he paid $1500. Among these stones were some extremely handsome dark purple amethysts, a large cabochon of orange opal, numerous small red garnets, some green chrysoberyl, colorless spinel or zircon, deep red ruby and an occasional sapphire, but no emerald. He said he intended to take these as a display collection to the Far East to generate interest in trading of raw uncut gemstones.

Important deposits
Amazingly, despite their long history, I was told that they have only had a written language in Somaliland since 1972. The country has a population of 1.1 million people, half of them nomadic pastoralists, and the main economy of the country is based on the export of around three million head of camels, cattle, sheep and goats from Berbera. The animals come from all over the region, including Ethiopia, making their way for hundreds of miles, grazing as they go. But agriculture cannot sustain the development of the country and if a legalized gemstone production can be established it will go some way to providing much needed foreign income.

If the continental configuration was reconstructed around 500 million years ago (the time when the Pan African pegmatites were formed, the source of many of the gemstones) then Sri Lanka and Madagascar, which at that time were part of African landmass, lie in the same geological belt of rocks that extend from Somaliland to southern Africa—the Mozambique Belt.

The diversity of gemstones that are coming to light suggest that some excellent material could become available and that with development Somaliland could be an important world producer.