Two out of three. That’s how life usually lets you pick among the preferred options. So have a look and see which one have traded in for the other two.
Everyone Hates RyanAir. Not me.
You read and read those dry HBR and assorted blogs and Inc, Fast Company and Fortune Magazine articles about how SPEED is a competitive advantage. You hear CEOs intone how their firms are committed to it and then, finally, you see the real thing. It was glorious ‘efficiency porn’ and it was absolutely riveting to watch. 13th October 2012. Berlin. Schönefeld Airport. Around 9 PM. Dry cold day. Clear skies.
The RyanAir BERIN-LONDON boarding area is full, there is NO chair available to sit so I am standing and getting more fidgety by the minute. Jutsyna and I had spent a long day in the city, 6 hours of which were spent cycling. I am tired. So are the 2 dozen other people who don’t have a chair to park their aching feet. And the 100+ sitting passengers didn’t look too energized either. And the plane hasn’t even landed!
And then it did. And the 737-800 pulled right next to our waiting area. 20 feet away.
I found myself thinking despairingly “Damn…they are going to take more than an hour to seat us inside!”
And I then saw what I suspect is either incredible German efficiency or maybe RyanAir’s . Or more likely an even mix of both. Because, AND I KID YOU NOT, in less than 25 minutes that plane, that had just landed and disgorged it’s passengers, was cleaned, refueled, recharged and the waiting passengers seated and we were taxing OUT for take off. In less than 30 minutes (I wish I had timed it for precision) we were wheels up and on our way to London. In less than 30 #$@%$&$ minutes !
There are flights I have been on where they took 30 minutes to DE-BOARD the passengers! And there are FAST FOOD outlets where I have had to wait longer to get served. Hotels where I have had to wait longer for a ROOM to be cleaned. And you too, I am certain, can probably think of countless businesses where SPEED was touted as a promise and then seen the promise resoundingly broken by the company.
RyanAir gets a lot of flak for a lot of things but this was a winning moment where the critical act demonstrated right there how their low fares were achieved. It is difficult to join the pitchfork mob online when one sees this kind of visceral proof of efficiency and commitment to speed. No brochure from their PR team can match this pit stop magic.
After this Berlin incident I find myself constantly thinking on many meetings and con-calls “…. we should be able to do X in less than 30 minutes …Surely if a Boeing plane can be turned around in 25…..”
Life in UK – TFL.GOV is fabulous!
A great way to get people here in India to think you are unhinged is to start a conversation with ” I think a local government body can provide good customer service!”
If ever that award was instituted, Local government body and Good Customer Service would easy win nominations here for ‘Oxymoron of the Century‘
But some places and institutions manage making the utterances of these 6 words in the same sentence possible.
Here is the email 2 days ago I got that started me thinking on that happy tangent.
I envy you if you read this email note and went ” So? what’s the big deal ? TFL did what it had to do.”
If your thinking was on the above lines, you most likely live in a enviable part of the world. Because here, this kind of email, if they ever got it and read it, would at once alert people that Leonardo’s character has drugged them for an inception attack. For NO WAY in the real world would a local govt body show this level of care and commitment to it’s tax paying citizens. Most agencies here have a motto about what it should do to it’s customer and that motto rhymes with ducking.
TFL London operates one of the slickest and most helpful websites for sheer utility I have ever come across (and I surf a LOT). And this in the same city which also headquarters British Airways. So all the more commendable.
This email demonstrates thought, care, advance planning and a fantastic scenario anticipation process over there at TFL HQ. Envy to all London residents.
And to those shoulder shruggers who want to take it all for granted, please come to Delhi NCR and spend a week here. Or even better, go use the Bombay version of the Tube. I promise you, you will GET this post on Day 2.
How to choose your 2013 goal of ‘Skill I will Acquire’ – A planning guide
Remember : This is totally a function of the individual, ambition and geography of the said person.This below is specific to ME and me alone. Your own will be different (I suspect). Don’t take away the content, instead take away the template Ok.
Airtel vs O2 – A Lesson in Customer Service
We who scrounge in this Kafkaesque spiritual and cultural desert in Big City India still have a few things going for us. Customer Service. I know. I’ll wait for you to finish your ROFLing.
Allow me.
Last month I had an O2 pre paid number in London for a month. Worked fine. Can’t really complain. Won’t praise it but….. It was Meh. But I had a query about Hotspot services that I wanted resolved an I thought I would speak to someone in support.
You know how they say particle physics is tough. This is tougher. Really. It cannot be done. Like going into and then actually exiting from a blackhole. It cannot be done. I went to the website to look for a number. Nothing. It cannot be done. UK (or maybe any and all first world countries where labour is expensive) is making it impossible for a customer to speak to a human with a pulse. If the website doesn’t answer your query, forget it. It cannot be done.
Thing is here I was, looking to GIVE O2 more money so I could use the HOTSPOT service if only someone could just help me understand the basics of it. They made that impossible.
Cue Airtel in India.
Airtel. “Great when it is working. Good luck when it isn’t.” Default universal motto for most firms here in NCR. Anyway I landed into IGI, got into Meeru Cab (is it me or are their cars now coming off the Bollywood stunt car parking lot AFTER live action shooting), and in about 9 minutes I called Airtel, got through to a rep, sorted the issue and in less than 10 minutes I had hotspot. 10 minutes. Something I could not get o2 to help me with in 21 days! This is exactly why I have been with Airtel for a decade plus. they probably have 20X the customer base of O2 and still 9 mins to get a issue resolved with a real person.
This is damn bloody good! Let me forever remember this incident every single time people moan about the sucky customer service here. Somethings in the third world is as good if not better than the first.
On Information Asymmetry
Information asymmetry is defined in wikipedia this : In economics and contract theory, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. This creates an imbalance of power in transactions which can sometimes cause the transactions to go awry.
Here is a lens with which to view business models (think FLIPKART/AMAZON/EBAY versus a OM BOOK SHOP/Borders/A used car dealership/ A tourist tout). Think about your favourite brands and ask this : If customers got more savvy is it BETTER or WORSE for the model or the business in question.
I have spent most of my time in India and I sometimes think a LOT of models are nothing more than businesses exploiting Information asymmetry and if a bunch of savvy people pooled time and money and smarts, they could BLOW up HUGE firms and make a boatload of money in the process. I bet in no nightmare in 1993 did the CEOs of Barnes and Noble or Borders think one some baldy call Jeff would take them them out.
That’s why the internet (and the telephone before that) is such a BIG thing. Because it is not so much a tool to visit Facebook.com as it is TNT to blow up firms that count on a customer without all the facts. Here is the brilliant Onion.com that captures the zeitgeist.
If you business and the model it is based on is POSITIVELY impacted by the decrease in Information asymmetry then I think in the long run you will be OK. way better than the firm across the road that is counting on a ignorant customer.Because ‘I don’t know about my options’ is a dying customer breed and phrase.
The Olympics at Meerut : A lesson about our Indian graduates seeking jobs
‘Enemies of Promise’, first published in 1938, is a critical and autobiographical work written by Cyril Connolly and it has a quote that resonates every time I hear someone talk up the BRIC countries – “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising”.
For a long time running now every bullish TV and arm chair pundit here and abroad dutifully intones about India’s ‘promising demographic advantage’ at every opportunity and platform. Like our pliant national animal, the Cow, I used to reverentially believe these experts about the said promising demographic advantage till quite recently. What really shattered my ignorant igloo like a reality fireball from hell was 3 weeks of interviews I conducted for my firm to hire grads who knew just enough to do some basic transactions for a client abroad. It was NOT a pleasant 3 weeks.
Before I open the kimono on that underwhelming experience, here is the full list of the actual questions I asked people who came, in the eager hope of getting that supposedly easy meal ticket to the urban middle class lifestyle that is the BPO job in the Indian metros:
1) How many weeks are there in 1 year?
2) How many years are there in a decade?
3) How many seconds are there in 1 hour?
4) How is a leap year different from a normal year?
5) What is 25% of 800,000?
6) What is the square root of 81?
7) What is the full form of ‘ITeS’ ?
8) Where are the Olympics being held this year?
9) What is the capital of U.S.A?
10) What is the capital of Japan?
11) What is the most famous structure in Paris?
12) In which country is Paris?
13) Name any 2 cities in U.S.A?
14) What is bigger – A Galaxy or a Solar System?
15) Which galaxy are we in?
Now remember, EVERYONE who was sitting and sweating undeo’ed in front of me was a qualified graduate from a UGC accredited institute. Every single one. Ergo the Indian educational establishment had given the guy a legitimate parchment that proves to the world he is a graduate in the sense the word is meant in Boston, Belgrade or Beijing.
Of the 117 graduates I interviewed, not a single person got all the 15 answers right.
Of the 117 graduates I interviewed, less than 17 got more than 11 right (from the 15 questions)
Some of the more interesting answers are below :
Where are the Olympics being held this year? – Meerut, Greater Noida, Delhi, Khel Gaon
What is the capital of U.S.A? – London, Canada, America, Beijing
What is the capital of Japan? – Singapore, London
What is the most famous structure in Paris? – Pyramids
In which country is Paris? – Africa
Name any 2 cities in U.S.A? – Most common answer: CANADA (WTF!?!?!), London
Which galaxy are we in? – Most common answer: EARTH, “woh, woh sir…doodh wala galaxy!”
My friends on Facebook could not just believe these answers were real. Hell, sometimes I could not believe it. From a college graduate. Few would disagree if I posit that I can get most of the answers from a 12 year old enrolled in a good public school in Delhi, Bangalore, Singapore or Helsinki. Even if, shockingly, your own schooling missed any of this, just how insulated or incurious do you have to be NOT to know the answers to the above questions ? It is said ‘Bad decisions make Good memories’. Well, these people must have a lotttt of good memories.
David Wallace in a commencement speech had this caveated parable for the listeners “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys! How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is ‘water’?”……The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about”
Dear reader, if you were bought up in India, you have NO idea how good you actually have it.
Till recently I sort of knew in a vague ‘Africa is BIG and malnourished, India is mostly agrarian and illiterate’ kind of unverified growing-up-trivia that the education in the schools my two brothers and I did end up going to was NOT the norm in this huge country. Since we three didn’t have the luxury of an education from Eton or Oxford, I always thought most of the people ‘around here’ got similar education as we brothers did, i.e CBSE standard’ish, basic, more than enough to help you navigate the adult world. The vanilla fundamental 3 R’s: Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, in the literal sense.
How off and wrong I was (…Am?)
I’ll repeat this, dear blog reader; you have NO idea how good you actually have it, esp esp if you have an Indian passport. Most of us were lucky our dice here in India rolled a double six. And the sad thing is, we don’t even know it did that. If we did, truly did, most of us would just get up now, head over to our parents’ house, knock and hug them for the advantages they gave us, at the cost of a ‘kids first’ life.
These pitiful 117 washouts I met in the interviews are the true slice and example of what mostly passes off as ‘education’ in India. To these washouts, CBSE English medium education IS ETON/G20 ! Look at these 15 questions again. Am I wrong in thinking it does not call for an advanced understanding of anything really, just a pulse and rudimentary awareness of the planet and life in it (20% of 800K, name of our galaxy). To not even know THAT calls for some spectacular mass hallucination and some very very low standards by the UGC and everyone else who is part of the state educational complex (scam?) in India.
All these thoughts landed into my troubled cranium and took hold of me and near well depressed my closeted patriotism, but after a while also compelled me to look around for the answer to just how bad is the rot? Or was it that I somehow was unlucky enough to meet the bottom of the barrel ?
Bless Google and twitter. I found the answer or at least some powerful clues.
PISA 2009
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/indian-schools-dwarfed-in-global-ratings-programme/890091/
Don’t read further until you have clicked and read the linked page. This blog will make little sense if you skip the link.
Done ? Well…There you have it. The answer to just how bad it all is.
A snippet from the link to cheer up Satyamev Jayate lovers out there: “PISA, introduced by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development (OCED), is an internationally standardised assessment that tests 15-year-olds in the domains of reading, mathematical science and science literacy. PISA 2009 was originally held with 64 economies, after which 10 more participated in PISA 2009+. The PISA report released last week includes the scores of all 74. India’s debut at the prestigious Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) saw some 16,000 15-year-olds from schools in Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu taking part. They ranked near the bottom in all categories, outscoring only Kyrgyzstan”.
I have written again and again and again about what a bloody scam and sham the education scene here at all levels in India actually is. PISA only visibly validates the rot that starts at the bottom and intensifies on its insidious trajectory upwards. Rakesh Mani, an ex-Teach India Fellow, has written a very good article on how the rot starts early too.
In short, an entire generation has been lost to us.
I challenge you to read the above PISA link and not go “HOLY TASTY COW!” (Of course the Indian HRD ministry would claim “Woohoo!! We are better than Kyrgyzstan! Someone give someone a Bharat Ratna”)
If this is India’s promising demographic advantage then I am Batman.
I am not and you there should now be immediately looking at emigration norms as soon as possible for you and esp your kids, before the ‘revolutionary’ riots starts. For I’ll tell you what this ‘promising demographic advantage’ really is : This is the mob that will be unemployed soon, angry, broke and vacuumed by self-serving political and criminal organizations (did I juxtapose two synonyms unnecessarily ) and shortly unleashed into a thousand Babri Mosque and Gujrat Godhra incidents near you. When our national motto officially changes to “My happy place is your happy place…burning to the ground”. No one will have the courage to remind them in this competitive global economy sometimes you have to forget what you want and remember what you deserve. You want a high paying job ‘Mr.fake graduate but real rioter’ ? Or the truth ? The truth is you deserve unemployment. Too harsh ? Sir, You may want to take that unexploded Molotov in your hand to your university campus over there and save the next generation.
Winter may not be coming down here but the riots surely are. How long will they just keep tapping at our car windows by the traffic lights begging for a chance at the opportunities they think they too should have ? Aristotle warned that the educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead. But atleast an illiterate man can console himself that he is poor and unemployed in 2012 India because he is illiterate but can you imagine the fury of a unemployed, unemployable ‘graduate’ from a uni in a cowbelt state who is for all real purposes no better than the first guy, no different from the dead, but is ‘credentially’ a qualified graduate in his head and in his university’s records ? Will he give up on his post graduation dreams only to see them crushed to bits ? Someone had it right when he warned ‘Don’t hang around people who have given up on their dreams because they are coming after yours next’
My advice : Time to pack your bags and head to a safer place, like maybe the capital of U.S.A. You can choose between London, Canada or Beijing. And don’t worry. They are all capitals of the U.S.A.
On Education : What I wish I had been taught in School
My education was based on State, ICSE and CBSE curriculum here in India. Full spectrum. I spent 19 futile years in that depressing factory. 19 full years. I was told and forced to memorize hundreds on complex chemical equations , obscure dates in history, India’s coal production output since independence, bizarre biology terms of unknown plants, crazy math equations with no bearing on real world application and the grammar rules that made no sense and worse had no application.
I did them all. And I passed all the tests. I topped my college in 11th std and was the 5th best student in my class when I finished my 12th.
See the table of contents of your old school books if you preserved them (jackass!) or of your kids if you have them (goodluck!) and marvel at the stupidity of it all.
What a total mound of fetid horse sh*t!
Here are some things I so now wish we were taught between all those shitty lessons above and which are actually far less complex than the above too. 19 for the 19 years I spent in the spirit killer zone.
#1 what is the exact way to invest in stocks ? What is stock ownership all about ?
#2 how does one set up a web page ? (this is NOT too difficult actually)
#3 how should one make a résumé that gets return calls ?
#4 how does one NOT be an asshole boss ?
#5 what are the top 50 habits any city dweller must have ? (Ex : let the ppl inside the metro/elevators get out first!)
#6 how does one become a good team player ?
#7 how should people run a meeting that works ?
#8 what are online scams to beware of ?
#9 how does one go about buying a mortgage ?
#10 what checklist should you follow when buying a used car ?
#11 how does one score cheap tickets online
#12 Exercises you can do at your desk or in your bedroom
#13 10 common phrases of the world’s top 5 languages
#14 How does one leverage RSS feeds ?
#15 A primer to systems thinking.
#16 how does one nail an interview ?
#17 what is the exact process in registering a small business ?
#18 how to use google smartly ?
#19 The top 20 biases and fallacies humans are prone to in decision making (very very powerful)
Some of this above may be total piff. Some painfully obvious. I missed some obvious ones I am sure.Let me know what else you thing should be added. When it hits 100, I’ll email all commentators the full list so you could maybe ensure YOUR kids, nieces, nephews cover their bases before they pass out of the shit factory.
Smarter people agree too.
One Step Processes Win Always
The laziest possible customer of your product should be able to engage with your product with ease. Seth Godin is right : “If you can, remove steps. Each step costs you dearly”. Conversion from viewing to purchase online is in the decimals ( 1% of 1% actually buy)
Amazon’s ONE CLICK shopping button was genius. There exists this HUGE opportunity both online and offline to remove barriers to purchase. And the best part is, removing/culling is easier than adding features. Caveat : It needs more smarts though. Lot more. That useless form to fill before you enroll, buy, join, purchase is losing you a lot of people. Why can’t it be via facebook/google ID ?
I recently donated to Wikipedia versus some Indian charities because the enrollment forms online for the latter are just so damn tedious. Wikipedia JUST WANTS the bare minimum details about me before they take my money. I actually prefer that so they get mine. Donations via SMS is a brilliant idea. Many of us don’t donate not because we are not altruistic but because the hoops are too much. Like to Payment should be a one hop jump.Remove the steps.
One click buy. One step process.
On Brevity – Corporate Lessons Learnt
In school, esp CBSE and state ones here in India, we are indoctrinated early and relentlessly that MORE is better. More pages to answer the question, more words and more verbosity gets you the higher grade. With this lesson firmly implanted into our heads, already crammed with other stupid lies and fallacies, we are sent into the real world. And lo and behold! The world is the very opposite of what we were told (As recent tweet cuttingly observes, ‘Reality is against Indian culture‘). And now we have to learn the very opposite of what we know and so also unlearn everything we do. And lesson #1 is that Brevity trumps Verbosity any day. The Agency, Manager or Company that is able to present it’s case quickly and sensibly is going to beat the competition.
TED talks are designed to be no more than 20 minutes and they are THE preeminent platform to disseminate important messages today. Twitter is 140 characters. max And they influence so much of culture and policy decisions now. Guy Kawasaki rightly advises people seeking VC funding to limit their presentations to 10 slides and cap the minimum font size in each slide to 30. And limit the pitch to 20 minutes.
Our emails, meetings and idea pitch all have to get shorter and slicker. Schools teach and reward the opposite. The real world punishes most of the behaviors and responses the schools teach you and your kid. Most of the teachers in our high schools and colleges are failed washouts who actually deserve their pittance salaries and who would last about 1 week in the real world. There is a reason the biting saying ‘Those who can’t do, teach’ caught on.
Don’t let school ruin your kids or your own chances. Today the elevator pitch is the ONLY pitch opportunity you probably are going to get 19 out of 20 times. In the 20th century, the most important and scarce commodity was capital. In the 21st, I think it will be ATTENTION. Because there are so many agencies that demand it from the very limited stock a person has to offer of it. So keep the message about you, your company, your product pared down to the bare essential and if that means you have to cut to the bone, just stop whining and start sharpening your knife.
Third Eye Observations 