Year End Review : 2011

Sometimes the best you can give to the world are things you give yourself FIRST and only later share with others. Firstly because you want the gift’s most grateful recipient to enjoy it. And because that recipient will then polish it and make it even better when it’s released into the wider world. Call it Selfish-Beta.This post, following in last years tradition,  is Selfish-Beta v 1.0.

Till quite recently I used to think of such introspective, ‘Review of a period in time’ post as a masochist chore that I would reflexively postponed into the future (….As the Spanish aphorism cuttingly observes – “Tomorrow is the busiest day of the week” )

Things change.

Now I find myself surprisingly energized and looking forward to the activity. Does writing often make exercising the fingers over the keyboard a easier activity ? ….I suspect regular bloggers would vote in the affirmative to that query.

And books are not really reviewed below. They were done in a separate post.

Onwards.

The earlier year, 2010, was the Year of Wanderlust.

That translated into THIS happy collage below :

(click on any photo in this blog to auto expand it to its FULL size)

And 2011 was a year of years. The arc of it’s kinetic narrative moves almost exactly like it did for one specific activity I dived into in the year. Scuba.

First a sense of foreboding. Then nervousness. Followed by panic. Then a sense of calm. Then unsteady  excitement that eventually morphed into full throated Woohoo!

Luckily the last phase lasted the longest.  And in the right order instead of the reverse! And that is, in my thin book of the mind,  a Good Damn Year. I would tag 2011, That year of New Activities tried.

And the number #1 lesson reinforced this year ?

OK. Now I sense this post in danger of becoming a bit of a narcissistic  ‘above-waist self-patting’ gooey Louis Armstrong affair and so I am going to deftly veer into a different terrain.

AWARDS!

Awards that I , the customer of the below things/stuff/experiences , gave to various entities and experiences last year that I am going to now replicate this year.

This post is a ton of fun and if I do it next year in 2013 I can claim tradition (three times in 3 years in a row is tradition in my book)

Note, these below are MY home brewed opinions. And some opinions are just invitations to be proven wrong.

So without ado, here are are The JAC Awards.

#Best New Brand I came in touch with in 2010 : Air Asia
#Best New Brand I came in touch with in 2011 : Chipotle

I will sell my soul any  damn day for a lifetime lunch of their delicious burritos.

{Wins because : Simple product. very well priced. consistent and brilliantly awesome every single time. While these previous adjectives look deceptively easy to nail down, believe me. It’s not. Chipotle manages it. Consistently}
Runner Up : Thai Airways

#Best Value For Money 2010 : Street food in Bangkok
#Best Value For Money 2011 : Full body Thai Massage, @KIM at Phuket, Thailand

{Wins because : For what J and I paid, we got one of the best VFMs in 2011. 60 mins of pounding, pressing, squeezing, beating and kneading that left us born again and stunned so much was given for so LITTLE in cost. Most of the times when you exit the shop/establishment in India/anywhere you are thinking the exact OPPOSITE so this here is an ART }
Runner Up : Scuba Diving @ Ko Phi Phi

[note : in both 2010 and in 2011, all VFM propositions have emerged from ONE country : Thailand. This is not just chance I suspect. Go there someday ye frugal traveler]

#Best FREE service 2010: The Staten Island Ferry
#Best FREE service 2011:  Instapaper

{Wins because : It passes the #1 test of this category – tomorrow, if this went PAID, would I pay ? Answer : Hell Yes!! Very Happily. I donated already. Btw donate to Wikipedia you shameless users all of you. I did. Instapaper has taken my Kindle and made it into a SUPER-device, and I find myself reading less books and more deep thoughtful LONGFORM articles from publications around the world and I can confirm: They are BRILLIANT. Try it out. It’s open to all, not just Kindle users by the way. google INSTAPAPER)

Runner Up : Dropbox (what a nifty funky service)

# Best Travel Customer Service Experience 2010: Virgin Atlantic, @London Heathrow.
# Best Travel Customer Service Experience 2011: ‘Tickets episode’ with Thai Airways


{Wins because : When J and I needed our tickets changed, Thai did it without fuss, without too much bumbling and best of all for us : FREE. Most airlines would have bled us dry given half a chance. And have)

Runner Up : PP Aquanauts Diving School, Ko Phi Phi

#Best FREE city experience 2010 : Courtesy the municipality of Paris
#Best FREE city experience 2011 : Pier Seats at Boston by the Charles River

{Wins because : Helped by the balmy weather and Boston summer weekend vibe by the river, the deck chairs on the pier offerd great view of the Boston East Side shore and just sitting there and soaking in the atmosphere was priceless. Thank you dear Boston Municipality!}

#Most Unexpected Good Meal : A very unassuming bakery in Rome that served the most orgasmic lasagna I have yet tasted.
#Most Unexpected Good Meal : The Spicy Tom Yum Chicken soup at a beach side restaurant at Kata Beach, Phuket

{Wins for the sheer unexpected drug-like hit it gives the tongue. I was NOT expecting it there and promptly ordered ONLY that soup for my entire stay in Thailand!}

Runner Up : Chipolte

#Most anticipated Good Meal that delivered 2010: Cu Cha (sea food like you will never taste again or have before) and W.A.W (world’s best chicken wings) on Jalan Alor St.
#Most anticipated Good Meal that delivered 2011: Steak at Ruby’s @ Cincinnati, Ohio

{Wins because : ….make NO mistakes. That above is really one of the most delicious pieces of food I have put into my mouth. Ever. My Scottish friends know how MUCH I love Holy Cow in my unholy mouth and this steak piece above above was beyond compare. People well versed in Hindu Mythology will find deep irony in a guy named ‘Shiva’ finding great joy in putting Nandi’s cousin into his mouth. Western friends : Just think of it like Santa eating his reindeers} ~ All this made possible thanks to Jackie and Mel.

#Worst Rip off at a tourist trap 2010 : The visually inviting street side restaurants near the common tourist spots in Rome.
#Worst Rip off at a tourist trap 2011 : Meal at Las Iguanas at SouthBank, London

{Bloody Waste of Lot of Money. Horrible}

#Best FREE sublime experience 2010 : Crowd watching parked on the fountain footsteps near the Pantheon, Rome.
#Best FREE sublime experience 2011 : Watching sunsets over Goa (snap below taken on iphone and then Instagram’d)

#Product I(we?) have the most ‘love hate’ relationship with : Facebook
#Product I(we?) have the most ‘love hate’ relationship with : Facebook [Still]

#Most Welcoming Experience : Being allowed INSIDE Harvard Business School’s famed Baker Library AND its underground book depository collection without being a student or bring escorted by one.
#Most Welcoming Experience : Stay at Hotel CasaBlanca, Phuket

{imagine staying at a cozy clean new hotel. where you never see other guests. and the staff wait on you hand and foot. and at midnight, drunk, you go the closed pool. and swim. and dry off. and no one bothers you. That pool you see above was just OUR pool!)

#Most reliably consistent product : The BlackBerry Bold 9000
#Most reliably consistent product : Omron Pedometer

{Wins because : Really. I never went anywhere without it. for a year. And it delivered. And I am fitter}

#Most irritating company to deal with as a customer either by telephone or on their website : Lloyds Bank!
#Most irritating company to deal with as a customer either by telephone or on their website : Ebay

{Their customer service is a very bad joke. On the Customer. Nothing shows their disdain than the way they treat anyone trying to reach out to ebay india. 17 emails and NOT ONE REPLY}

#City that quite doesn’t deliver : Singapore
#City that quite doesn’t deliver : NCR

Really?!!? you want me EXPAND and EXPLAIN this ?!!?! The smog, the crimes, the filth and the stray cows and dogs are not the worst of it actually. It’s the sheer rudeness of the residents. Painfully visible in the way Old people are shoved aside in the metro and the way traffic rules are totally disregarded. NCR is not so much a city as the waiting room to Hell.
Runner Up :  Phuket TOWN- Boring place versus all else Thailand has to offer. An in-between stop at best.

#Most overpriced service/product not worth repeating : The GMAT exam as ‘sold’ by gmac.
#Most overpriced service/product not worth repeating :  Phi Phi Island Cabana Hotel, Ko Phi Phi

#Most stunning good discovery : At the ‘will be crowded soon’ I.G.I-T3 Food Court, 4Fingers.
#Most stunning good discovery : Hotel Casa Blanca, Phuket

#Best website you probably don’t know about on the net : http://www.couchsurfing.com
#Best website you probably don’t know about on the net : http://www.longreads.com

{seriously, Longreads + Instapaper + Kindle = Goodbye boredom. Forever}

#Experience I regret rushing through : The Met in NYC and the Louvre in Paris.
#Experience I regret rushing through : Lake Shore Drive Area, Chicago

{Really. should have spent way way longer time there. did’nt. Totally regretted it}

#Most consistent brand in 2011 : Flipkart

{Just works. Exactly as advertised on the tin}

#Best author discovered this year : V.S.Naipaul. Christopher Hitches.
#Best author discovered this year : J.M Coetzee

{The Prose. OMG. What a t a l e n t e d dude. Read at once.}

#Product of the Year : Amazon Kindle
#Product of the Year : Timex Heart monitor

{Has TOTALLY redefined my approach at the gym. I now ONLY do as the watch tells me. “The Zone” is all}

#Location of the Year : Soi Rambutri St, Bangkok.
#Location of the Year : Ko Phi Phi

[click on this pic belos to see it in its actual AWESOME size, taken by a friend who was with us there – Lou]

Runner Up : Cambridge (snap you see below was taken by VERY talented gf bobbing  and punting on our boat!)

#Experience of the Year : Paris.
#Experience of the Year : Diving at Ko Phi Phi

{There I was. On the edge of the boat. With a lifelong fear of deep water. Strapped to 20 litres of oxygen. Being egged on by my dive mater to jump in. After what seemed like an eternity, I did. Where the only sound was my own shallow scared breathing consuming that oxygen way too fast. And after a few minutes, when the initial terror subsided, I opened my eyes. And everything till then, leading to THAT ONE moment, …all that…they became worth it. I was in another world and I knew it then : I’ll forever remember this moment }

After all that happened this wonderful year, one of my all time fave author captures it’s Spark.

So 2012 has a high benchmark to top. This will have to be driven by the RIGHT question. As all good things are. And what’s The Question driving 2012 for me ??

Infograph to check if you are you at a good firm

So this senior leader finished his presentation, that like a bad movie lasted too long. After this powerpoint slides orgy, he turns to us and optimistically inquires “Any questions?” For about 60 seconds all of us there are treated to the sound Indians in cities rarely enjoy : Silence. And then he,  with palpable relief ,says “Good. I hope you all now got the point. Thank you!”

Here is the real point to remember instead :

Tips for BPO interview candidates in India

Here is how you can crack this interview with me, that right now you are failing damn miserably:

 

1# Don’t EVER EVER start the interview saying “Hello Sir. Myself….” You do that and your already meager chances of being hired just got divided by 500

2# Don’t also ever start with your personal/family background. I am not marrying my daughter into your family. Honestly I don’t (no offence) give a fish about your family. My boss doesn’t for mine. I pay it forward.

3# Always start with “I have XX months of work experience. My most recent one was with So&So inc. Here is what I did in that job……”

4# NO ONE on this good green earth gives a f**k about your “career objective”; you put that on top on your résumé and you are subtly but right away telling me you are a lightweight. Delete it at once.

5# We are more interested in getting leprosy than in your hobbies. So delete this too from the résumé at once.

6# You are vying for a job in an INTERNATIONAL BPO. Our customers and clients are in USA/UK/Europe.Not Jhasola. If you slip into hindi suddently, forget it. Just get up and walk out. The interview is now like a girl taking contraceptives in her eighth month of pregnancy. 

7# pls pls pls wear a deo man. I am your future boss. Not the dog that is later expected to hunt for you in the forest.

8# You are wearing sneakers to an interview. Below formal trousers ? And this trouser is below a faux leather jacket on top ? Just….go.

9# Your 300 word essay here you had to write before this interview. Lots of BPOs now do this to test your english. Because we don’t trust the indian schooling system anymore. we are forced to verify ability independently. OK. I wasn’t expecting Naipaul but this excuse here in front of me looks a lot  like Kalmadi’s track record : ugly, embarrassing and disgraceful. Neat Trick : Memorize a 300 word essay on something you are passionate about. vomit it when here. (what ? no passions ? what about the stupid carom hobby you listed here in this disaster résumé in the useless hobbies section ?)

10# for pete’s sake, mention 3 ACHIEVEMENTS at your last job. Do it in a calm confident voice. Even if I forget to ask, wedge it in somehow somewhere in our interview. Don’t just mumble about your experience and that your sister’s husband is working at Ghaziabad as a DTP operator. 3 ACHIEVEMENTS at your last job. That’s how you stand out fool!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Why this angry post ? Motive ? These above tips come from my current hiring experience (nightmare). I needed just 20 people with good comm skills for a project I am overseeing. I had to sieve through 200+ for these meagre 20 and what a gut wrenching painful chore it proved to be (is). Made far far ugly by most of the aspirants who were making combos of the above mistakes. Everything above is based on someone making that mistake listed.   I am going to keep adding to this list. With noble intent. To help future aspirants. Myself now leaving . Good Night !

On Marketing : Using the Fan Base

If your business is the kind that could do well with reviews and references from happy customers, what’s stopping you from leveraging it ? If you are a seller of a service that you are proud about and confident about, would you not stand to benefit from your customers letting others know about what you are selling ? What if you incentivise the happy ones to talk about your product and in return pay them in kind or with a discount ? Think about HOW you could do that. Be creative and also pls DO DO be subtle and classy. Don’t over-preach to a zealous choir.

So if you sell fantastic coffee that blows away an fan of coffee and that guy has 452 friends on FaceBook and 321 on LinkedIn and 112 people follow him on twitter , what’s stopping you from telling the guy “Look Tom, every time you talk about us on your network, I am going to give you a free refill buddy. And do it only till you feel we are selling awesome coffee. Stop it when you don’t FEEL it“.

First off, this is a not one of those fake chirpy creeps on Shopping Network Channel, speaking in a patently fake voice about another shitty vegetable dicer. This is a real living breathing fan.

Second, when your accountant/CFO tut-tut’s and tsk-tsk’s you about silly offers like this,tell him this has way better ROI and AUTHENTICITY than sterile print ads that no one really stops to read anymore. This buzz is far more potent.

Third, this does wonders for your own unit’s morale. I mean, come on. You are selling things ppl are FAN of. Have a thing for. Love. Adore. (Think Apple fans). You aren’t just another tree falling in an empty forest. You will be missed when you are gone.

The free refill is only a polite thank you to the fans.

So first make something that is worth being a fan of and about and then make something up to thank them fans for spreading the word.

2011 Books Review

And so 2011 is ending.  And what a ‘interesting’ year it has been! A roller-coaster I was scared to get onto, continued to be scared when it initially accelerated but something I started to reallyyyy enjoy and get the hang of as it picked up momentum.

This post is not about 2011 as a year. That is for a later post when I am more sober.

This post is all about the books I read this year and my reviews of them. Yes. Books. I’ll try to keep it straight and short  in the vain hope it helps the few (who didn’t instantly jump away to the youtube url on reading the subject of this post) just maybe choose something to add to their  own 2012 reading list.

Edward Morgan said ‘….A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face.  It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.’

Here is where I managed to find my provocation and privacy in 2011 :

Click on this image to see it in bloody decent size!
Click on this image to see it in bloody decent size!

And below is my ‘Be bloody quick about it Shiva‘ review  of the above books:

The Places in Between : 8/10
Rory, the proverbial ballsy Scottish mensch, walked across Afghanistan right after the US attacks there had started and survived to pen abt the adventure. This is his story. And what a brilliant story it is. Simple, accessible prose that describes the landscape and people he meets in a way that makes you go ‘wow!’ again and again.
My Recco : Buy and read as soon as possible!

Rework : 6/10
Good book for anyone either starting their own venture or wondering how they could add more boost to their team and dept. I like 37Signal’s blog and this seems like an offshoot of it.
My Recco : Buy it if you want to raise your game at work a little/lot.

AA Gill is away : 8/10
Part hilarious, caustic,funny,jaded and curious, this book will have you laughing and nodding your head while you thumb through it. Gill reviews a lot like his buddy Jeremy Clarkson and his brand of brit humor is just as lethal and laugh out funny.
My Recco : Read it on the next long haul flight.

Homage to Catalonia : 7/10
My poor education in European history got in the way of my enjoying this book as much as I hoped I would. That said, civil war has never been described in such accessible prose and one cannot finish this book and not like Orwell even more. War is boring, pointless and hellish and Orwell shows you why.
My Recco : Skip CNN and BBC for a month and just read this instead. You’ll understand international conflict better. Really.

Unaccustomed Earth : 7/10
A series of 8 absorbing tales about life, relationships and the ties that bind. mostly in Boston/USA. While this is not quite as good as her earlier book ‘Namesake’, Jhumpa still is a great storyteller. The first story in the book was the best for me.
My Recco : Buy it and read it on a rainy day when you are feeling a bit melancholic.

Among the believers : 8/10
Naipaul. How can you go wrong. While his heavy prose sometimes got a bit too much, his analysis of the religion and its hold on the people and the culture he contacts is unparalleled. My Feb 2011 review right after finishing it was ” Sharp writing. Naipal is caustic and devastatingly observant as ever. Among the four countries he profiled around 3 decades ago, only Malaysia escaped a depressing bleak fate. Penned in 1980, this book I suspect is more relevant NOW. An adult look into the Muslim faith and it’s fanatical believers.”
My Recco : Not for the light-hearted, this adventure is best be undertaken when you want to do some really HEAVY mental lifting.

India : An area of darkness
India : A wounded civilization
India : A million mutinies now
9/10
These 3 books can be counted as a unified meditation by Naipaul on India spanning 4 decades. If I has skipped all my Indian history class in school and just read these 3 books, I would have had a far far richer nuanced understanding of this country. A better, sharper and yes,scathing, critique of India will be tough to come by for a long time. While this was my review on ‘Wounded civilization’ earlier in the year, it can just as easily apply to all 3 in this punchy trilogy:

” …….Right off the bat I’ll say it : this is a brilliant book and I can see why this guy got the Literature Nobel Prize. The prose….is divine. And his commentary is equal parts scathing and genius. equal parts scalpel and sledgehammer. Consider how chapter #8, Renaissance or Continuity, begins: “Ghandhi lived too long“. Talk about blunt. This is part of his India trilogy and I cannot wait to get the other two. As an Indian I can say I am equal parts depressed and angry after reading this book. This man, passing through a country, made more astute observations about us that rivals the entire output made ‘inhouse’. You’d think I am spewing hyperbole. Read the book.”
My Recco : These are the definitive ‘India Books’ you should visit sometime in your life. Be ready for witheringly cruel personal observations about India. Read them but maybe not in one sitting (you’ll shoot yourself from the depression that will overcome you). So do it over time. Like maybe a decade or two.

The Bed of Procrustes : 8/10
Taleb’s aphorisms are mixed. Some made me go ‘What?!?!”, some “WTF?!!?” & “Bullshit!” and a lot along the lines of “wow!”; Some bits grate you, other just blow you away with their penetrating insight.
My Recco : Buy it and read in small doses over a month to truly appreciate it.

Ender’s Game : 6/10
An acclaimed Sci-fi novel about a 11 year old kid trained to lead a fleet to war. and his genius siblings. Some bits were absorbing. Some just bloody pretentious and boring. I was glad when it was over.
My Recco : Skip this.

RingWorld : 6/10
This Sci-fi story kicks of with a lot of kinetic potential but somewhere in the middle it is squandered. I expected something like Clarke’s Rama series. Still, the idea of Ringworld stays with you as an awe inspiring concept long after the crummy story is forgotten.
My Recco : Unless you are a die-hard sci-fi fan, skip this one.

Watchmen: 8/10
Dark.Depressing.And oh-so beautifully illustrated. Alan Moor’s depressing prognosis of humanity’s chances in an alternative world with superheroes and communism in it is equal parts epic and  This is not the commando comics we used to inhale during school. this ain’t your Tintin adventure. This is only for the gutsy adult in you.
My Recco : buy it and read it to appreciate what the medium can be elevated to in the right hands and head.

Art of Travel : 7/10
Botton’s essays on travel are equal parts lessons in the mindset to take along on a trip and the history and evolution on the art. Those of you born with the wanderlust genes would do well to keep this close to you when you visit your next destination.
My Recco : Take this to your next trip and read it before you return.

Letters to a young contrarian : 8/10
The Yoda of contrarians teaching the next generation on the art. In his characteristic prose that you almost levitate to while reading. And as ever, you’ll pick up some new words to add to your vocabulary, come across some phrases that bends your mind with it’s sheer evocative genius and also learn about history and art and philosophy. Yup. Every Hitchens book pretty much raises your IQ a notch when you are done with it.
My Recco : Buy it and read it again and again and again over the years.

And the BOOK OF THE YEAR:

Hitch 22 : 10/10
‘A good book has no ending’ said R.D Cumming. I wish this was true for Hitch-22. This is the BEST autobiography bar none I have read in my life and I am say with absolute certainty I have not seen prose this good in one before. What a man! and what a life! Yes, I am biased towards Hitchens as I, like a lot of others, look up to him as one of the very very few ‘heroes’ still alive so this review may be a bit tainted. Here is my full detailed review of this book.
My Recco : If you read only 1 book in 2012, make it Hitch 22.

And to those who will continue to skip reading in 2012, just know Twain once commented: ‘The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.’

For 2012, here is a taste of some new books and some old books I want to visit and re-visit before the year is out :

Click oon this to see it in decent size!
Click on this to see it in damn decent size!

And oh yeah, the title of this post is borrowed for Stephen King. His original quote went “Books are a uniquely portable magic!”

Here is a toast to you finding your magic in 2012.

The likely connection between Profitability and Good Customer Service

ka-ching! : An imitation of the sound made by a cash register, used when someone’s action will result in more money.
Wow! : In this context, the exhaled sound from a delighted customer walking away from the transaction. Usually precedes the Ka-Ching.

Click to enlarge

So the greats (Amazon, Zappos, Apple, Southwest) easily manage both on the above two sounds with reassuring frequency.
The Losers (Go Air India!…or any state managed or funded institution) easily manage the other end of the equation. Communism is an ode to this quadrant.

Interestingness as always is on Quadrants 2 and 4 (top left and bottom right)

Your local bookstore (Coffee shop? Lending library ?) may not be raking in the moolah but you and I sure damn love them don’t we ?! (remember Meg Ryan’s store in ‘You Got Mail’ ?)

And when you have a quasi-monopoly or a govt granted one, profitability can be had even if customer respect is forever elusive. On a longitudinal scale, sustainability is hardest I suspect for THIS category.

And the incompetent managers of the Air Indias of the world need to know pumping money without any real focus on improving customer service is a definition of ‘hopeless financial black hole’ (heard the phrase ‘Putting house before cart?’)

Now my last contention is the Greats have a different more subtle challenge. Everyone falls for the universal lie that a profitable company just totally needs to grow (bloat) on and on and keep at this growth. So the profits fund that. But great customer service is based on a very ‘intimate’ hard won culture nurtured by the early folks and it gets more diffused due to this growth. A real paradox. Few companies can manage the balance. MOST lose the way somewhere. You want to be as small as possible and as big as necessary. The puzzle is not about scale; it’s about scalability. Read Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1’ for more on what happens when original culture binds no more and you can’t scale.

So now this above is THE challenge to the winning CEO, not just dealing with the more easy decision of where to open the next outlet.

Trust Your Staff

“We don’t trust you”

That’s the subliminal message drilled every time you are groped by the guards at the mall entrance, DMRC metro stations, at the cinema halls and now much worse, at your workplace.

A level headed alien could take out a calculator and with that ALONE demonstrate that from an odds angle, the drive to any of the above places had a much much better chance of killing you than any lame terrorist threat that the above security theater hopes to prevent (they won’t anyway as Bombay demonstrated)

Every time you have to send an email to your manager for his approval for anything in the org, the message is “we don’t trust you“.

Innovation, exemplar performance and outside the box thinking will not germinate in such hardened soil. Take the risk. Trust the people. Odds are they’ll live upto it.

The Mindset of Great Firms

If you are the owner of a new pizza store and selling to the customers living in the community, what was your mindset before you opened it?

How can I sell a pizza to people here and make a ton of money doing it ? mmmmmm, money.

OR was it :

Can I sell the most delicious pizza around here?

Most failed businesses start with that first question. Most failed businesses missed by its customers start with the second. they just forget ‘Free Cash Flow’ is just as important as ‘Customer Love’.

Unobviously most businesses that are alive and successful ALSO start with the second question. Rarely the first. Most surviving enterprises around you likely started with the ethos of the noble second question and then move to the ruthlessness of the first. Facebook. WalMart. Ford ?

The mindset is all. The rest is details.

On Innovation at Staid Firms

A phrase in the article ‘The Next Russian Revolution’ By Chrystia Freeland in The Atlantic about Skolkovo, a planned ‘silicon valley’ of sorts in Russia is worth rehashing : “…..After all, one of the most important—and, if you happen to be a democrat, inspiring—lessons of the past two millennia of human history is that open societies are better at innovation than closed ones.”

This is a NOT a tedious essay about Skolkovo, Russia or democracy. That phrase helped clarify why innovation is such a elusive goal for most corporations. why there is 1 Apple for every 100+ phone making enterprises.

A corporation is at best a benign fascist organization in most places on the planet. The CEO its anointed head. Some heads execute their role well (Welch at GE, Robert Goizueta at Coca Cola) and  some don’t (Skilling at Enron, Araskog at ITT). In Asian countries, even more so, what with its regimented ‘Always obey The Leader’ mentality drilled right from the workers schooling phase. Think typical classes in Singapore, Tokyo and Delhi. You don’t really ‘vote’ for the CEO. He is thrust upon you, the cog. Like honesty and the local politician, innovation and hierarchy rarely mix well.

This is NOT the introduction to an Anarchist manifesto to overthrow this tyrannical system.

Rather, that line in the article, hints at why we find it so difficult to innovate out of a morass of low growth and single digit margins in most enterprises.

If you decide to get a dog to your workplace what would happen at your company ? What if you tried to wear sandals, tee and a cargo pant to work ? At the enterprise where I toil I know it’s going to be minutes before security hauls my ass to HR. And my company is actually one of the better places here in my city (NCR). Yet far too many companies like mine desperately want to see ‘Innovation’ and have launched hundreds of failed initiatives to encourage it. That line in the above article hints why they fail. An open enterprise where tolerance for the non-criminal but ‘weird’ is allowed is far better positioned to reap the rewards of innovation than a closed door ‘265 pages HR rulebook’ run enterprise. If your workplace has a strict ‘dress code’ that is enforced by the under-employed slugs in HR, I can bet it is not at the cutting edge of innovation in it’s industry.

Po Bronson, one of the most eloquent chroniclers of Silicon Valley’s great burst of creativity in the 1990s, titled his classic 1999 book The Nudist on the Late Shift. The naked programmer of his title was a guy who happened to prefer working without any clothes on, and his insistence on exercising that harmless personal choice—on the late shift, when few others were around—struck Bronson as characteristic of the Valley’s famously libertarian and individualistic ethos.

Maybe Paine’s Rights of Man ought to be next on the recommended reading list for the innovation minded CXO.

For some services, SHORT is the new AWESOME.

London Heathrow Airport is an ode to modernity, technology and the jet age. It is enormous, a glorious city in itself a, proud proof to what men can build when they dream big. Today it is the world’s busiest airport by international passenger traffic. In the last 8 weeks I have travelled through it twice. Both times the experience was similar in that Arrivals was a long painful experience and Departure a short pleasurable one.

It looks like LHR’s management, BAA, have done everything to make your average flyer enjoy the experience of visiting it. From the latest shiny terminal, T5, to all the duty free shops to the enormous parking spaces, to it’s connectivity to London’s local transport systems to the clean cool waiting lounges, it looks like considerable effort and thought has been put to the whole thing.

Compare that to IGI T3, India’s latest attempt at proving it is ready to play at center court. It does not bode well that its previous attempt was the Commonwealth Games. We all know how that turned out.

But I love the IGI T3 because it’s motto (and keep in mind the T3 management does not realise it) is ‘Get the average traveller to want to leave it as soon as possible for here’. Nobody really wants you there. And I am speaking for the folks who work there and manage it along with the people who pass hurriedly through it . But in chasing this subconscious goal they are doing something BAA should maybe learn too : There are some services and institutions that best serve their customers by making the service experience of it shorter and briefer.

Think a hospital, police station, the voting experience or calling to resolve a billing dispute with your mobile operator. This is not the visit The Louvre or the new Apple store. Lingering is an option most will pass for the earlier mentioned places.

So do do make it easy.

And T3 -IGI ensures you want to and can get out of it FAST. I have probably set world records. Once I was out from the aircraft and into the local taxi in less than 30 minutes. No arrival at LHR matches that. On the contrary I still remember some horrendous long lines at UKBA (UK Immigration) where I was held up for more than 2 + hours. At Dallas airport, I kid you not, in August this year; I was in a line at customs that was almost half a KILOMETER long.

Maybe starting with the mindset ‘How can we make the visitors experience as SHORT as needed’ is actually a smart question in the planning meetings  of these institutions vs ‘How can we make it a plush, rich, awesome experience’. Maybe for some services, SHORT is the new AWESOME.