Catalign Innovation Consulting

John F Kennedy (JFK) and the freedom of the free world

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:25:24 +0000

John F Kennedy (JFK) was the torchbearer of the free world at the height of the Cold War. The New York Times hailed him as someone who “reasserted American leadership of the free world”. When JFK visited the Berlin Wall for the first time on June 23, 1963, he said, “There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the communist world.” JFK paused and then added, “Lassen sie nach Berlin kommen!” (“Let them come to Berlin!”) What did freedom mean to JFK? I got a glimpse of it when I read the then New York Times bestseller, “The Dark Side of Camelot,” written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. Some of the claims made in the book are disputed. However, the broad tone is not. Here is what I gathered from the book about what freedom meant to JFK:

Freedom to manipulate elections: Chapter ten is titled ‘The stolen election’. Hersh argues that JFK’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, contracted with Chicago mafia leader Sam Giancana and got help from the organized crime syndicate to manipulate the election, especially in Illinois and West Virginia. It involved vote fraud and vote buying. Not all historians agree on whether the Kennedys had a deal with organized crime. However, most agree that there was localized vote fraud. But then the fraud might have been there on both the Democratic and Republican sides. And perhaps vote fraud has been a part of the democratic election process from the beginning. In Hersh’s words, “Money bought Joseph P. Kennedy enormous personal freedom, and bought his son the presidency.” My takeaway is that the Kennedys had the means to manipulate the election, and they exercised it.

Freedom to overthrow and kill foreign leaders and civilians: Hersh and most historians agree that JFK approved and sustained intense covert efforts to remove Fidel Castro from power, including operations that explicitly involved assassination. The first major operation, the Bay of Pigs, was a major disaster. The CIA recruited and trained 1400 Cuban exiles in Florida for attacking and overthrowing Fidel Castro. On April 17, 1961, the CIA-recruited army made an amphibious landing at the Bay of Pigs, on Cuba’s south coast. The expectation was that there would be widespread revolt against the Castro regime. Instead, two days of fierce fighting resulted in 114 deaths, and 1200 from the exile army were captured. Hersh quotes Kennedy saying, “If we have to get rid of these…men, it is much better to dump them in Cuba than in the United States, especially if that is where they want to go.

Another major overthrow operation supported by the JFK government was to outlive not only JFK, but would consume three more US presidents and eight successive military governments in South Vietnam. JFK approved US support for a coup against Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu in 1963. Ironically, it was JFK who had strongly armed and supported Diem during the early part of his tenure. American troops in Vietnam went from 900 in 1961 to 16,000 in 1963. They were officially classified as “advisors”, though many were involved in combat-related operations. With US support, Diem was expected to fight against communist-backed opposition; instead, he started fighting Buddhist and other independent political groups. On November 2, 1963, Diem and Nhu were seized by General Minh’s troops in a Roman Catholic church, blindfolded, and executed by gunshots to the back of the head. “Americans are gratified by a sense of joy that they find in Saigon,” the New York Times commented in an editorial on November 4. While the number of people (civilians + military) killed during the coup was small (less than 50), over the years, the Vietnam War would cost the lives of close to 3 million Vietnamese (military + civilians) and over 50,000 US soldiers.

Freedom to use women like painkillers: “You know, I get a migraine headache if I don’t get a strange piece of ass every day,” JFK is quoted as saying in the book. Whether true or not, historians agree that JFK was extraordinarily promiscuous and compulsive in his pursuit of women. JFK’s partners included women from the glamour world, such as Marilyn Monroe and Judith Campbell Exner, who was also a friend of Mafia don Sam Giancana. But they also included a nineteen-year-old White House intern (who published her memoir in 2012), and numerous others whose names JFK couldn’t remember. So, he would say, ‘Hello, kid. How are you?’ One of his lovers recalls in the book, “I was just thrilled. Here is this handsome older man. He’s interested in me. But in retrospect, it’s really sad. I was just another girl. There was a compartment for girls, and once you were in the sex compartment, you weren’t a person anymore. I got declassed and depersonalized.”

So, what did freedom mean to JFK? Was it about using money, power, and position to fulfil one’s desires? Was it about changing the world to match your desired image, one in which there is no communism and the US is ruling the world? Perhaps, it was all of this. Daniel Kahneman says in ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, “We can be blind to the obvious, and we can be blind to our blindness.” Whether JFK was blind to his obvious biases, I don’t know. From his actions, he appeared to be a prisoner of his biases, yet he successfully managed his image as a hardworking chief executive and an attentive husband. But then, who is not a prisoner of his biases?

Learnings from Khushi Chandak on her electrochrome-based startup journey

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Sat, 23 May 2026 09:58:42 +0000

Khushi Chandak was a second-year Electrical Engineering student when she attended my course "Managing technological innovation" in Spring 2025 at Desai Sethi School of Entrepreneurship (DSSE) at IIT Bombay. After the first or second class, she told me she had a startup on sustainable e-ink displays. I was surprised. In the second year of B.Tech., you don't start a company on display technology. I would have been less surprised if Khushi had said her company was into JEE mentoring marketplace or genAI-based animation. Anyway, she was absent for most of the course. Then I bumped into her this Spring when I was back on campus teaching the same half-semester course. I was curious about her startup journey, and she readily agreed to share it with the class.

"Imagine these class walls are made of glass, and with a tap of the switch, I can make it opaque or change its tint. Power consumption is an issue in commercial buildings with a high window-to-wall ratio. A tint can reduce sunlight entering the building and make it more power efficient." - This is how Khushi started her talk. We were curious now.

Here are the key points from Khushi's startup journey:

Finding the right technology & experts: It began at the start of Khushi's second year, when she and her co-founder thought they could make eyeglasses in which a tap could change the lens color. The idea was selected for the IDEAS program run by DSSE, where selected teams go through customer and technology discovery over six months with the help of mentors. While researching, they realized that they needed to use electrochrome technology, in which material properties like color change with electricity. They found that IIT Bombay has a faculty working on the technology. They approached the professor for advice, and the discussion led to the professor joining them as a co-founder. This was a turning point.

The danger of attachment to an idea: Khushi and her friend met between 100 and 150 people - potential customers and opticians, local vendors, as well as branded ones like Lenskart and luxury brands. They tried to find out if the idea is interesting and how much people would pay. They also started building a prototype and realized that 500 ml chemical costs Rs 35,000. Working on the prototype during Dec '24-Jan '25, they realized the glasses won't sell below Rs 20K. Then they reached out to experts working on electrochrome technology, mostly within India, but a few outside India. Three research groups were working on it in India. But the technology had not scaled like battery technology.

But the team decided to go ahead with prototyping plans. They were able to demo small glass prototypes changing colors. For three months, two of them were working late nights, with 2-3 hours of sleep. Their project got selected at an IIT Madras competition in the top 25 out of 200 applications. Here, they got a strong negative feedback and were convinced that the product won't sell. One month was spent in frustration, but finally, there was an acceptance, and they decided to pivot. "Don't get too attached to the idea," Khushi said.

Learning to fail fast: They decided to work on flexible plastic sheets. In two weeks, they realized this idea is not viable. The market for e-paper displays was still in its infancy in India. This was faster. What next? Then they looked at buildings with high glass facades and with openings for natural light. They talked to architects and builders. The market looked promising. However, they realized they needed to move from a 5cm x 5cm prototype to a 4 ft x 6 ft window. This would take 4 to 6 years and significant capital before they reach the market with a product.

They incorporated the company in May 2025 and received multiple grants. They could demonstrate a 5 cm x 5 cm display for 5K cycles, perhaps a first time in India for the type of electrochromic technology they were working on. However, at this juncture, the girls asked if they are ready to make a long term commitment to this venture and decided to back out.

Productizing small wins: Looking back, Khushi felt they could have considered productizing the small glasses they had prototyped, perhaps as part of a larger painting, such as a Varli painting.

Despite the setback, Khushi and her co-founder are still together, looking for their next idea. Khushi, who made the presentation in my class last January, was definitely more mature and more confident than the Khushi I met a year ago. While she had put in a lot of effort for the venture, she had been wise enough not to borrow money or dip into her savings. Wishing her the best in her journey ahead.

Insights from a deep-tech entrepreneur, Dr. Darshit Parmar, CEO, Flash Cryogenics

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 10:47:00 +0000

It was a pleasure to have Dr. Darshit Parmar, Co-founder and CEO, Flash Cryogenics, give a guest talk in my class at Desai Sethi School of Entrepreneurship (DSSE), IIT Bombay, a few months ago. Darshit is no stranger to the campus where Flash Cryogenics (FC) is incubated. In fact, the campus has been virtually his home since he came here from Rajkot almost a decade ago to do his M.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering. By the time Flash Cryogenics was officially registered in 2024, Darshit had spent 8 years researching and maturing a cryogenics technology. He was the third PhD student, working on this technology, at the cryogenics lab led by Prof Milind Atrey, who is a co-founder and mentor at FC and presently the Deputy Director of the institute.

Darshit began our class with the question: What is cryogenics? When you use refrigeration for creating spaces below -150 °C, it involves cryogenics. MRI machines with cool superconducting magnets, preserving biological specimens like stem cells, liquified natural gas (LNG), and rocket fuels such as liquid hydrogen and oxygen, need cryogenics.

Here are my four key takeaways from Darshit’s talk:

1. Need to perfect the technology before taking it to the market: Darshit began his research with the question - Can we use HVAC materials and reach cryogenic temperatures? Like most of his classmates, he thought he would take up a job after finishing his Master's. Prof Atrey used to bring visitors from industry and academia to the lab, and the students would demonstrate how a normal HVAC compressor can be used to achieve -200 °C. The visitors used to be surprised. This convinced Darshit that this technology is likely to have commercial potential. However, it had missing pieces. Darshit spent the next 4-5 years maturing the technology.

2. Customer discovery is very important: In 2018-19, Darshit realized that he needed a business plan. He joined the I-NCUBATE program jointly organised by DSSE (DCE at that time), IIT Bombay, and GDC, IIT Madras, which nudged him towards customer discovery. He dropped out in the middle, perhaps due to demands from his research; however, he realized the importance of answering the question – Who is my customer? One possibility was blood banks. They said they were ready for pilots. However, no one submitted a letter of intent. Healthcare is a heavily regulated industry, and hence, not a good place to start your journey. Then came the pilot project from the chemistry lab. It was completed successfully. However, there was also a realization that the market for such refrigerators is very small. This is when, in Darshit’s words, the shit hit the fan. It led to introspection – What is our USP? 3 things came up – 1) temperature flexibility -40 °C all the way to -200 °C, 2) energy efficiency 20-30% cooling efficiency, 3) sustainable refrigerators when one combines ozone depletion potential and global warming potential. Could LNG be a market? Yes, very small in India right now, but growing. Could data center cooling be a market? Yes, mostly outside India right now. Could Liquified Bio Gas (LBG) be a market? Yes, potentially. During customer interaction, a new problem was discovered, biogas separation – separating CO2 and Methane. Could FC solve the problem for the customer? Could FC build a cryotherapy chamber for a resort? As the FC team began interacting with customers, new avenues opened. Now, FC has reached a point where there are orders, and the FC team needs to deliver. And eventually see which option scales.

3. Cost and speed of experimentation matter: A company like Zepto gets started with two people, two laptops, and starts generating revenue from day one. A company like FC works differently. Simulations do get started on a laptop. However, the proof of pudding lies in showing a physical demo. For Darshit, the prototype was built when he got a couple of grants, one from the institute itself and another from Nidhi Prayas from the Department of Science and Technology (DST). Many experiments didn’t work. For example, the compressor module worked well, but the freezer cabinet failed for a couple of iterations. For an energy solution, it is important to have your own test lab. If there are claims to be made about energy efficiency, it helps to be confident through internal testing before going for an external energy audit. Initially, FC had to outsource the freezer chamber. It cost more, it had quality issues, and each improvement iteration took longer. For example, the local vendor didn’t understand what vacuum insulation means. Eventually, FC built its own workshop and testbed with cutting tools and a welding machine. Darshit knew a bit about fabrication, which helped.

4. Patent where it is really important: Patenting is expensive. Filing a patent for India region costs about ₹1.5 Lakh, and filing a patent for protection in the US costs ₹20 Lakh. If you want to cover all regions, such as the UK, the EU, Australia, etc., it will cost ₹70-80 Lakh. Moreover, big organizations easily find ways to circumvent a patent filed by a startup. For example, if FC files a patent to protect a refrigerant mix that improves energy efficiency by 30-40%, a big player can easily change the mix a little bit and get the advantage. Hence, Darshit feels that startups should patent where it is really important. Does it mean you should not patent at all? No, a big player is also worried about its brand being damaged if found infringing on other players’ patents. Legal battles are very expensive. It is best not to get into it in the first place.

With an energy crisis looming large across India, we need companies like Flash Cryogenics, which can play a role in liquifying biogas and natural gas. Deep tech is a game of patience, and FC is still exploring its product-market fit. We wish Darshit and the FC team all the very best in their journey ahead.

Electric Vehicle: To go or not to go for it?

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 08:36:00 +0000

By mid-2026, our Maruti Estilo Zen will be fifteen years old, and the registration will expire. It was bought in 2011 by exchanging a 12-year-old car, guess which one? Another Maruti Zen! When I mention Estilo in my class, students say, what? The car has run 48,000 km in 14.5 years, that’s 3.3K km per year. ChatGPT says, “That’s extremely low usage.” And, it is in excellent shape. Now, I have two options: to renew registration for five more years or to go for a new car. And, if it is a new car, should I go for an Electric, an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE), or a hybrid model?

I checked in our apartment parking lot; we have 0 electric or hybrid cars, many electric two-wheelers, and a total of 40 cars. Maybe all of us living here are late adopters. So, I checked the Manipal Hospital parking lot, which is within walking distance from my place. It had 3 Battery EVs (BEV), 3 hybrids, and a total of 40 cars. In 2025, BEVs accounted for around 5% (up from 2.6% in 2024) and hybrids another 2-3% of the cars sold in India. Fast charging stations may be quite limited once you leave the city. Overall, the adoption is growing but low.

In the US, the Big Three, Ford, Volkswagen, and GM, have scaled back their EV strategy recently. Ford has taken a huge write-off of $19.2 billion. GM’s charge on reassessment of EVs is lesser $1.6 billion. One sector where car-related anxieties get amplified is rentals. In the US, Hertz went public in 2021 after emerging from bankruptcy. In the same year, it made a pivot to electric and made a bulk purchase of 100,000 Teslas – estimated to cost around $4.2 billion. In just two years, range anxiety, charging station paucity, and unfamiliarity all had a combined effect of customers not opting for EVs and resulting in higher-than-expected collisions and damages. Hertz declared in its 10-K filings that it would “significantly reduce the size” of its global EV fleet. It finally took half a billion in write-downs and disposal losses by end of 2024.

On the regulatory front, on December 16, 2025 EU moved away from its 2035 100% EV mandate to allow for a 90% reduction in CO₂ emissions by 2035, which creates a 10% 'flexibility gap' for highly efficient hybrids and combustion engines. The EU was following the footsteps of the Trump administration, rolling back the “EV mandate” in early December. US automakers are now required to meet an average of 34.5 mpg (miles per gallon) across their model fleet by 2031, a dramatic drop from the average of 50.4 mpg 2013 mandate proposed by the Biden administration.

In India, the EV policy favours BEVs. FAME II subsidies apply to BEVs, not to hybrids. Tata and Mahindra have taken the BEV-only route so far, while Maruti and Toyota are pushing for hybrids. The 2023 IIT Kanpur study and the 2025 International Council on Clean Transportation report on life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions indicate that HEVs may be at least comparable if not better than BEVs in the Indian context. Such studies are region-specific, where “cradle-to-grave” analysis consists of vehicle manufacturing, usage, maintenance, recycling of components, and finally, disposal. The “well-to-wheel” analysis includes oil extraction, feedstock cultivation, transportation, refining, fuel production, blending, and supply. IIT Kanpur study considers India’s electricity generation mix from thermal, nuclear, solar, wind, and hydropower plants in different regions. Why do Indian policies favour BEVs?

One thing I learnt from the Epstein saga is to follow the funding sources. Epstein donated money to Harvard, MIT, Clinton-related entities, etc., and, in turn, received money from Leslie Wexner (Victoria’s Secret), billionaire Leon Black, etc. Could India’s EV policy be influenced by the big corporations? Yes, it is possible. During the 2024 Lok Sabha Polls, Tata Group-backed Trust donated ₹757 crore to the BJP and ₹77 crore to the Congress. Who knows how favours get returned? Or, could it be a bias due to the "Make in India" initiative, favouring Tatas and Mahindras against Suzuki and Toyota? The IIT Kanpur study was supported by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), Japan. Could there be a bias in this study towards hybrid due to the sponsorship? Yes, it is possible.

Currently applicable (2022-27), the Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency-II (CAFE-II) norms require an average efficiency of ~113 g CO₂/km. That is 48 miles per gallon (mpg), which is roughly where US norms were before being relaxed this month to 34.5 mpg, corresponding to 158 g CO₂/km. Maruti’s R C Bhargav may have a point when he said last month, “The norms of CAFE, as they have been framed, actually favour bigger cars. As weight decreases, the norms become less and less favourable for smaller cars.” The smallest Tata car (Tiago 1.2, 1050 kg) weighs 25% more than WagonR (850 kg). Mahindra discontinued the compact car of a similar size (KUV100 NXT, 1085 kg). For Tata Motors, compact cars account for 16% of its passenger car sales. Small cars is a shrinking market in India, while SUVs is a growing market. It is in the interest of Tata Motors and Mahindra to sell us the dream of SUVs.

I drive occasionally. I purchase all groceries by walking around, use a cycle for going to the Metro station, bank, post office, and anything within a 2-3 km radius. Taking the car out to a nearby restaurant is problematic because finding a parking space is a challenge. My maximum mileage may have come from commuting to the IIM campus. In the coming year, the metro line to IIMB may become operational, and my car usage may reduce further. I travelled to Kallianpur (near Udupi) and Gokarna this month for holidays by train and bus. I take the KIAL bus to commute to and from the airport many times. I don’t see any reason for buying an SUV. I feel it is too big to maneuver, less efficient than a compact, too cumbersome to find a parking space, especially if you don’t have a driver. And, BEV is not suitable when the usage is infrequent. Unlike an IC engine, a battery degrades even when parked.

In short, my best bet is to renew the registration for Estilo for five more years. If that doesn’t work out for some reason, I will go for a compact IC car or wait for a compact hybrid like Maruti Fronx due in 2026. Is it possible that I was convinced of the answer to begin with and went looking for data to support it? Yes, that is possible😊

A reflection on 2025 through management of innovation, design thinking, and mindfulness lens

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 09:41:00 +0000

This is my reflection on the year that has gone by through the lens of three areas of my work: management of technology and innovation, design thinking, and mindfulness.

India is just waking up in deep-tech; it takes ten years: 2025 was the year of tariff and trade wars. In India, various industries were impacted due to the trade war. For example, Textiles and apparel, logistics, automotives, pharma, IT services, and more. Markets have bounced back since then. However, the uncertainty remains high. I was really impressed by China’s response. Nelson Wang, Vice Chairman of RimPac and Asian Studies, mentioned in an interview, “China has been preparing for this situation for ten years.” (5:30) Over the last decade, China reduced its dependence on the US export from 20% to 11.5%. It controlled rare earth magnates, and it was in a dominant position in the Nexperia crisis. It has made strategic investments in key technologies like batteries and EVs, AI, semiconductors, telecom, renewables, space tech, and biotech. Fighting against the century of humiliation that began with the defeat in the first Opium War (1839-42) remains the central theme in CCP ideology. China has demonstrated strategic foresight and execution in tackling American imperialism. China’s R&D budget is 2.7% of GDP while India’s is 0.66% of GDP. And China’s GDP (USD 19.4 trillion) is almost five times India’s GDP (USD 4.1 trillion). India is just waking up. For the first time, Indian government has allocated ₹10,000 crore deep-tech Fund of funds in Union 2025 budget and RDI scheme has earmarked ₹20,000 crore in FY25-26 for deep-tech sectors. Several VCs, including Celesta Capital, Accel, Blume Ventures, Premji Invest have created an India Deep Tech Alliance with a USD 1 billion commitment. Like Wang said, it takes ten years. Let’s hope the focus remains unwavering. A couple of 2025 bright spots: Pixxel launched a satellite constellation doing hyperspectral imaging at 5-metre resolution with 150+ bands and ePlane signed an MoU reportedly worth $1B to supply 788 VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) air-ambulances.

The year of stampedes and a case for design thinking: I started conducting design thinking workshops for Social Entrepreneurship students at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai in 2011. That time, IT services companies in Bangalore said empathy was not relevant to them as their customers are far off in the US and Europe, and agile implementation was more important than rapid prototyping. Things changed during Vishal Sikka’s tenure as Infosys CEO (2014-17). In a short time, Design Thinking became a buzzword. I was a beneficiary and did many workshops across the country. All along, I knew that anything fashionable fades after some time. However, to my surprise, DT didn’t fade away. I continued to do workshops. 2025 convinced me that DT won’t be going away anytime soon. This year, India witnessed 9 stampedes in public places, costing over 100 lives. The year began with two stampedes in January: the Tirupati temple (6) and the Maha Kumbh (30). Then New Delhi railway station (18), Goa temple (6), RCB stadium (11), Jagannath Puri temple (3), Hardwar temple (6), Vijay rally in Karur (41), and finally Andhra temple (9) last month. The chaos and vandalism at the Messi event in Kolkata this month didn’t result in any casualty but 17 people got injured. It shows how poor we are in designing stampede-proof public places and crowd management solutions. I remain committed to studying, teaching, and applying design thinking to solve complex social problems.

Mindfulness research enters toddlerhood, and mental health becomes a fundamental right: Mindfulness traces its roots to Buddha’s teachings. However, secular forms of mindfulness emerged in the late 19^th and early 20^th century in Burma (now Myanmar) from the Theravada tradition and in Japan from the Mahayana-Zen tradition. Given various dimensions of mindfulness, such as religious vs secular, seated vs on-the-go, goal-centric vs journey-centric, group vs individual, therapeutic vs soteriological, it is not surprising that there are several ways to be mindful. Neuroscience of mindfulness as a discipline emerged in 21^st century when the brain imaging techniques became more accessible for the researchers and subjects became available after the adoption of clinical intervention programs such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Goenka’s Vipassana. It is generally believed that the neuroscience of mindfulness is in its infancy. 2025 marks the publication of one of the first major meta-studies on mindfulness. The paper is titled “The mindful brain: A systematic review of the neural correlates of trait mindfulness” by authors from MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and West Chester University, Pennsylvania. It assesses 68 correlational studies across various forms of MRI and EEG. It identified some consistent results and many gaps in understanding. In my opinion, this year marks the neuroscience of mindfulness going from infancy to toddlerhood.

IITs and Kota-like factories have witnessed several student suicides in the past decade. India’s Parliament passed Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, which guarantees the right to access mental healthcare. However, the implementation remained poor. In the July 2025 Sukdeb Saha vs Andhra Pradesh case, the Supreme Court found systemic gaps in how institutions handle student stress and mental health. In the verdict, the Supreme Court declared mental health as an integral part of the constitutional right to life (Article 21) and issued binding guidelines to protect and promote psychological well-being in educational settings. Let’s hope the needle moves.

Founder and CEO Madhav Krishna on three key turning points in the journey of Vahan, India’s largest blue collar recruitment platform

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 04:47:00 +0000

By the time I started my course “Strategic management of technology and innovation” in September at IIM Bangalore, generative AI had come down from the peak of the hype cycle. It had been a couple of months since the MIT Media Lab report was out, highlighting that ninety-five percent of genAI investments are seeing no business returns. I started looking for a concrete use case where genAI is making a difference in India today, and I wasn’t optimistic in my search. That’s when I came across Madhav’s interview on YouTube. Madhav Krishna is the Founder and CEO of Vahan, India’s largest blue-collar worker recruitment platform. Vahan enables over 40,000 placements per month. The Vahan team is proud to have Airtel as a strategic investor, and it was part of the 2019 cohort of the Y-Combinator accelerator program. Through YC, Madhav met Vinod Khosla, and now Khosla Ventures is one of the investors. Through Khosla Ventures, Madhav met Sam Altman, and now OpenAI is a strategic partner.

In this current scale-up phase of Vahan, Madhav must have been very busy. However, he graciously agreed to come and talk to the students in my class (On September 25). Madhav shared three turning points in Vahan’s journey. Here is a summary:

Moving from offering vitamins to painkillers: Madhav started programming at the age of 12, did an MS in AI from Columbia University, worked at E-commerce and Edtech companies for 7-8 years before returning to India with an ambition of making a real impact on society. Vahan was started in 2016 with a voice bot offering for learning to speak English. Anybody with a feature-phone could call Lakshmi, the virtual teaching assistant, and practice speaking English and get feedback. Then, Vahan created verticalized training programs to train the sales force and drivers, etc. They got paid pilots from Uber and FMCG companies. However, pilots didn’t get converted into contracts. That’s when Madhav and team realized that while spoken English is a nice problem to solve for blue-collar workers, the burning problem is finding a job. It is the difference between a vitamin and a painkiller. Vahan decided to go for the painkiller and pivoted to the recruitment space.

Aligning with the dominant business model: India has 600 million blue-collar workers. 200-250 million are in Agriculture and related areas. And the rest are in construction, logistics, retail, etc. Recruitment of blue-collar workers is a highly unorganized market, and hiring is done mostly by thousands of local agencies, especially in tier-2-3 towns. Vahan was able to repurpose the technology built for skilling towards lead generation. Initial customers started paying on a per-lead basis. However, this business model received pushback from the market. In India, hiring services don’t get paid on a per-lead basis, especially for blue-collar jobs where the churn rate is high. You get paid on a per-hire basis. The Vahan team tried pushing a pay-per-lead model. Lead generation is where they have more control. Moreover, in the pay-per-hire model, payment happens after 30/60 days to rule out the place-and-churn tactics. However, after a year and a half of fighting, Vahan finally embraced the dominant pay-per-hire model. Zomato, their lead customer, agreed to send the recruitment dashboard daily. Initially, not every customer was willing to put effort into preparing and sharing recruitment data in real-time. Vahan guys had to chase them. But over time, the process got automated. Now, Vahan gets live data from almost all customers. Madhav says, “Generally, it is not a good idea to fight a dominant business model, especially in markets like India.”

Solving high-value problems in a low-trust society: With the pay-per-hire model, Vahan started scaling. However, they realized that the efficiency of the product was low. From the set of candidates Vahan recommended, only a small number got hired. Given the hiring requirements of these companies, this was puzzling. Vahan decided to probe further. Ultimately, they realized that the root problem was a lack of trust. In India, especially in the blue-collar segment, hiring happens through referrals. It is a very human-driven discovery process, either through friends, family, cousins, etc., or through local recruitment agencies. These are typically solo entrepreneurs with a small team. And they will be on the phone all day making calls. Most high-value expenditure in India, like opening a bank account, buying insurance, a loan, a car, or a home sale, etc., happens through humans, not digitally. In fact, 60-70% of customers of Zerodha, one of the leading stock brokering platforms, are brokers, not retailers. Vahan tried personifying the bots, but that didn’t work. Eventually, they decided to build a platform for recruiters, and that worked. Today, Vahan has a network of 2000 recruiters who use the platform, access demand data, match candidates, and track the progress of the hiring process. Recently, Vahan re-introduced their original offering, a voice-bot, in a new avatar. The bot talks to candidates, asks basic questions, qualifies them, and answers FAQs. It currently supports English and Hindi, and Vahan is planning to extend the support to at least eight more Indian languages and their dialects. This voice-bot has increased recruiters’ productivity. Madhav feels that in low-trust societies like India, it will be human plus AI play for some time. AI will automate the repetitive tasks, but humans will play an important role.

As Vahan scales, it will need to grow its recruitment network and offer more value-added services to recruiters, recruiting agencies, and blue-collar workers. Personally, it was a great learning experience, and I am sure the same was true for students. I wish Madhav and Vahan the very best in their future endeavours.

Remembering Ganesh Prabhu, a friend and collaborator

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 11:18:00 +0000

It has been a year since Ganesh departed. It was as if Ganesh had negotiated the details of the departure time. His course was over, and the grades had been submitted. Ganesh liked to work out details. He would call me to check if I am available on a date ten months later. Initially, I would double-check with him if the year is correct. Slowly, I got used to it. My calendar would have a huge empty space followed by some slots that are blocked for a program with Ganesh.

Ganesh's detail orientation stands out while talking to his old friends. Utkarsh Majumdar and Jose P. D. are two of them. They were neighbors in the IIM Ahmedabad hostel during FPM days. Jose continued to be his neighbor even at IIMB. Both of them collaborated with Ganesh through executive education programs, some of them lasting multiple decades. Ganesh would have worked out the program details, so it was easy to run those programs, they recall. For Jose, Ganesh was the go-to man to clarify any institute policy or regulation. And Ganesh would approach Utkarsh to check if a particular answer was correct, even though Ganesh had set the exam paper.

Ganesh and I would meet often in the Staff Canteen, either for breakfast or lunch. For breakfast, he would come on his signature Ather 450. I asked him why he didn't walk from his house; it is such a green campus. He said "Naah" with such conviction, I didn't dare to ask that question again. Once, he seemed excited as we were approaching the canteen. I asked him if there was anything special. Ganesh said, it is Saturday, there will be masala dosa. He was fond of guessing the items during the executive program's special lunches. "There will be mutton biryani," he would declare much before arriving at MDC, "or Malabar fish curry."

Ganesh would carry a serious face with his thick mustache ninety percent of the time. And, once in a while, he would burst out laughing, mostly at his own joke. I wouldn't have been able to guess that he was the prank master in the Ahmedabad hostel. Apparently, he went walking around dressed like a sardar and many people didn't recognize him. Ganesh was a big fan of Govinda during college days. It is not clear if he got any company for Govinda movies. At least once, he had pulled reluctant Utkarsh into watching one.

Ganesh, Jose, and Rishikesha T. Krishnan joined IIMB together in 1996. Next term, in early 1997, Rishi and Ganesh offered an open executive program, Creating Successful New Products (CSNP). It was a big hit. The program led the duo to first study the challenges in product development in the Indian industry, and then they focused on the software product development. The study outcome was first published as a set of challenges faced by the Indian industry and later as a set of lessons from six cases in the software industry. Interestingly, many of the six software products studied in the paper twenty-five years ago still exist in some form. For example, Infosys BANCS2000 (now called Finacle), Ramco's Marshal ERP, and even the niche Urdu word processor from Concept Software are still around. Subsequently, Ganesh ended up leading the CSNP program and ran with it till last year. I started participating as a co-teacher in the program in 2014, and we did one in November 2024; it was our last program together.

Ganesh told me once that when he joined IIMB, he didn't enjoy teaching. But he liked research. And pretty soon, he got a paper in the Academy of Management Review, one of the most prestigious journals in management literature. This work was done in collaboration with Gerard (Gerry) George, who was at that time at Syracuse University, and the paper explored the role of Developmental Financial Institutions (DFIs) as catalysts of entrepreneurship in emerging economies like India. "What I really loved about Ganesh was his 'self-starter' spirit," recalls Gerry. Ganesh took the initiative to reach out via email (in 1998) when Gerry was an assistant professor to work on a project involving Development Financial Institutions (DFIs). They met at the Academy three years after they started working together! "Now we advise the new generation to network and build relationships before projects, but our relationship was built on getting projects done first, even before we met in person. I haven’t had a coauthor like Ganesh in thirty years! A person who delivered diligently on a terrific collaboration based on trust and competence," remembers Gerry. Looks like he didn't pursue this line of research. But this AMR paper isn't Ganesh's most cited paper; "Social entrepreneurship leadership," published a year earlier (1999), has three times more citations. This was way before social entrepreneurship became fashionable in India.

By the time my interaction with Ganesh began in 2014-15, his research enthusiasm had come down, and he was enjoying teaching. At least that is what he told me. Ganesh's signature course for PGP was New Product Development. This is where he started using short video cases. In fact, he uploaded his entire NPD course on Vimeo much before the MOOC and IIMBx started. I borrowed some of the video cases from him. When I showed interest in the Zipline drone video, he would tell me how he uses it from timestamps 2 minutes to 9 minutes. If you ask him why, he would have a detailed reasoning ready. He also taught qualitative research for the FPM students for multiple decades. Ganesh was part of the doctoral committees of a couple of dozen students. Some of these relationships might have started from this course on qualitative research. Jaykumar, who had Ganesh in his FPM committee, remembers that his research direction emerged while discussing his qualitative research course paper with Ganesh.

Ganesh was the placement chair three times. Perhaps this is where he built his intuition on career advice for MBA aspirants. We were discussing non-research writing, and he knew I blogged regularly. Ganesh said he doesn't write blogs. And then he added, "But I answer questions on Quora." And then he sheepishly added, "I have forty-eight thousand followers." I looked at him in disbelief. I find giving career advice very challenging. So, my admiration for Ganesh grew multifold. He was clearly a career influencer.

Design Thinking took us to places like IIM Visakhapatnam and the Indian Oil Corporation in Delhi. This is when I discovered that Ganesh and I live in two different time zones while being in the same city. Ganesh used to start the two-day program, and I would start from the third session. Participants would ask me questions like, "I am a left-brain person, can I learn design thinking?" I realized that Ganesh had covered left-brain-right-brain stuff earlier. I carried a strong belief that the creative thinking-right-brain and analytical thinking-left-brain classification is a myth created by folk psychology. I attended Ganesh's sessions to understand his perspective. It prompted me to study this topic further and write a blog on it.

Utkarsh remembers Ganesh as a deals man. He would keep track of who is offering the best deal in the town. I wanted to buy a laptop a few years ago. And Ganesh immediately had the top 3 suggestions ready with trade-offs associated with each of them. He was fond of Ather e-scooters. I used to call him first-day first-show Ather fan. He had 3 Ather scooters. And he had bought some of them on the day of launch. For most people, e-scooters are a recent phenomenon. Ganesh owned e-scooters since 2005. But he used to ride the scooter only inside the campus. Utkarsh asked me if I ever sat with him on his scooter. I hadn't. Apparently, Ganesh never crossed 40km/hr, causing irritation to everybody riding with him and driving around him. Ganesh could talk about the EVs for a long time. So I decided to interview him and uploaded it on YouTube. Even when Ola Electric had a fifty percent market share, Ganesh would tell me, "It will not succeed." He was plugged into the EV owners' network. When someone asked him for advice on buying an e-scooter, he said, "Buy anything other than Ola." I used to marvel at his intuition.

As I was talking to Ganesh's friends for this article, the most surprising find for me was his passion for Hindustani Classical music. Like Rishi-Utkarsh-Jose, Vidyanand Jha was Ganesh's FPM batchmate at IIM Ahmedabad. But his association with Ganesh goes back even further. They both did an MBA at the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA). Vidyanand remembers they both attending all night classical music concerts, starting at the back row and then slowly moving toward the front as the night proceeded. Vidyanand wrote a poem on Ganesh in his condolence note.

I had health issues last year. Stomach infections, weight loss, insomnia, etc. It resulted in my withdrawing from a course I was scheduled to teach in the June term. It was the first time for me. Ganesh was my sounding board. We had a program scheduled a couple of months later. I checked with him whether we should cancel that too. He was confident we would do it, and we did. He kept nudging me to take a second opinion. I eventually did, and the second doctor suggested that I didn't need any medication. And that's what I did, and slowly things came back to normalcy. Ganesh had this great gift of helping. We will miss him. May time grant Ganesh’s family the strength to move forward, carrying his presence in quieter ways.

Acknowledgments:

Appreciate the inputs from Rishi, Vidyanand, Utkarsh, Jose, Jaykumar, and Kajoli.

The seven-day weekend and Ricardo Semler’s loaded gun

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 03:34:00 +0000

My initial reaction after reading Ricardo Semler’s “The Seven-Day Weekend” (SDW) was disbelief. “How is this possible?” That was twenty years ago. Even today, it feels as though the story came from some other planet. The book created such a deep impression that I ended up leaving my job in 2006 and became self-employed. I have remained so till now and am not likely to change it anytime soon. My consulting and teaching assignments in the last two decades took me to several organizations over three continents. I didn’t see any trace of the workers’ democracy depicted in SDW anywhere. I mentioned SDW in a blog in 2008, and then forgot about it. However, my personal lifestyle became close to SDW: it may involve working on a Sunday, a hike on a Monday, reading a novel on a Tuesday, etc.

A few months ago, I started preparing a presentation for the board of a cooperative hospital in Mumbai. My study took me from a member cooperative to a worker cooperative and then to workers’ democracy, and then I remembered Ricardo Semler and pulled out SDW from the bookshelf. Holding the book in my hand itself created such vibes as if I were meeting an old friend. I created a short case on Semco and discussed it in my class last month as an example of organizational innovation. Most students dismissed it as nice but impractical stuff. What’s so special about a seven-day weekend? Is workers’ democracy as esoteric as it sounds?

After taking over the family business from his father, Ricardo Semler turned São Paulo-based Semco (erstwhile Semler & Company) into an on-the-job democracy by relinquishing control and letting everyone question the existing rules. While questioning dress code, work timings, and the necessity to work from office may not sound like such a big deal today, letting employees decide their boss, salaries, new products, and so-called strategic decisions such as acquisitions and factory closures looks surprising even today. Ricardo gets called only when needed. That is why he spends time feeding the ducks in a pond on a Monday.

Ricardo defines Semco more by what it is not than what it is. “Semco has no official structure. It has no organizational chart. There’s no business plan or company strategy – no two-year or five-year plan, no goal or mission statement, no long-term budget. The company often does not have a fixed CEO. There are no vice presidents or chief officers for information technology or operations. There’s no human resources department. There are no career plans or job descriptions. No one approves reports or expense accounts. Supervision or monitoring of workers is rare indeed. Most importantly, success is not measured only in profit and growth.” Despite this amoebic structure, democratic control, and the Brazilian economy’s rollercoaster ride, Semco grew much better than its peers. When SDW was published in 2003, Semco businesses operated in areas such as marine pumps and industrial mixers, cooling towers for commercial properties, property management for commercial customers and hospitals, airports, hotels, and huge factories, environmental site remediation, risk management, incubation of hitech ventures, outsourcing of HR, and inventory control. Most companies are not publicly listed.

Dissent is the bedrock of Ricardo’s world. As an extreme example, he tells us the story of Marly dos Reise Leite during a period when she had grown cantankerous and a pain in the neck for everyone around her. She complained constantly about her situation and quickly got into personal fights with her director of operations at Semco Johnson Controls. He could have easily fired her, but that would have meant a lot of explaining to the employees. Finally, even her colleagues began to find her disruptive. While there was pressure to fire her, the leadership felt, “If she wants to quit, that’s up to her, but we can’t fire her for dissent.” So, they did what they always did when there was dissent: nothing. After a few job changes within Semco businesses, Marly eventually settled down. Her complaining subsided and eventually stopped. In fact, she recommended Semco to her 23-year-old daughter, who joined ERM, another Semco business. “To date, I don’t know what changed in her,” Ricardo admits.

Ricardo explains the situation using a loaded gun analogy, “The system at Semco does not allow me to impose my will on the company, even if I wanted to. Sure, I’m the main shareholder, so I always have a loaded gun in a drawer and the right to fire it. Worker self-management can’t stop me. But I know that there is only one bullet in that gun, and if I fire it off in a fit of pique, I’ll get one shot. One shot at overriding a popular decision, after which I’ll be disarmed. I’ll have lost everything I have worked for. People will know that democracy at Semco was fleeting, insincere, and unreliable. That’s too high a price to pay.”

Transparency is the oxygen of democracy. At Semco, shop floor workers, machinists, clerks, and cleaning people get invited to the all-hands meeting held once a month. If cleaning staff are to make informed voting decisions and raise concerns, they need to understand the financials. Semco went at length to simplify the books and got the simplified format validated by Walter Barelli, who at that time led the Inter-union department of study of economics and statistics. Based on the simplified format, an instruction guide with cartoons was prepared. The union at Semco conducted training sessions based on the cartoon booklet. And soon the quality of interactions improved during the all-hands meetings.

The most critical test of self-management came in the early 1990s when the Brazilian government enacted several emergency plans that wreaked havoc on the economy. Semco lost many contracts and couldn’t meet payroll for two consecutive months. Banks failed, and times were desperate. Workers gathered at company meetings in the cafeteria. Many took turns at a microphone for long, arguing over the fate of Semco – the same cafeteria where many had collectively interviewed their CEO, and machine tool operators had shouted technical questions to gauge their future boss’s knowledge.

They tried everything they could think of to avert layoffs and closures – they’d left machines to sell spare parts on the road, had severed contracts with maintenance, cleaning, and even security providers to take those jobs on themselves, they’d driven company trucks in shifts, and had taken turns doing kitchen duty. The employee committee studied the numbers carefully and concluded that there was just enough money left in the till for a generous severance package. The workers in the cafeteria voted. They shut down the factory. Two hundred souls lost their jobs. They elected to distribute the remaining cash between them. Throughout this process, Ricardo opposed closing the plant. But in the end, workers’ self-interest won – they chose a course of action that they knew best for themselves. “Employees must be reassured that self-interest is their foremost priority, one they must take care not to replace with company or other interests,” says Ricardo in SDW.

While studying management of innovation, I came across workers’ democracy employed while managing the production process. For example, Toyota’s idea management system enables 95% of the shop-floor workers to contribute and implement over two million ideas every year. Through the TQM movement, this kaizen process was deployed in India, especially in the manufacturing sector. In the Internet era, organizations ' Employee Stock Option Plan (ESOP) is common, and some organizations also have the twenty percent rule, or the right to experiment, for example, at 3M, Google, etc. However, idea management systems, ESOPs, or the right to experiment don’t translate into employee participation in making key decisions. Such decisions are made by a small team in leadership positions behind closed doors. Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Perhaps I have not looked hard enough. So, I went looking for some examples exhibiting workplace democracy.

I realized a better place to look for is worker cooperatives. Cooperatives come in different flavours – worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, producer (or farmer) cooperatives, etc. India has had a long history of cooperatives, mostly of consumer (or user or member) type and producer type. A couple of thousand cooperative banks in India belong to the consumer cooperative category, while a couple of lakh village dairy cooperatives would belong to the producer type. The hospital I visited earlier this year is a consumer cooperative, and its staff had almost no say in its operations or strategy. The Amul brand is owned by Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), the most successful dairy cooperative in India, with over 3.6 million milk producers as co-owners.

Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) is a trade union that governs a network of cooperatives, including worker, consumer, and producer types across several states in India. SEWA has nearly two million workers as members which are divided into (a) home-based workers, (b) vendors/hawkers, (c) manual labourers, and (d) service providers/producers. SEWA cooperatives are likely to be worker-centric and involve a lot of community education programs.

Outside India, Spain, Italy, and France each have 20, 10, and 3 thousand employee-owned firms. Industrial Commons movement (Molly Hemstreet’s TED talk in April 2025) exhibits a growing interest in creating employee-owned community-centric firms in the US. Uruguay has over 700 worker cooperatives. In short, workers’ democracy exists across the world in pockets as a feeble movement.

Apart from cooperatives, there are noteworthy self-managed organizations as well. Dutch home care organization Buurtzorg, with 14,000 employees, consists of over 900 self-managed teams with nurse autonomy. Buurtzorg has no middle management. Haier, the world’s number one home appliance player, with 70,000 people, recently broke its organizational structure into over 4000 self-organizing micro-businesses. For the past twenty years, they have been developing a model known as RenDanHeYi. Haier CEO Zhang Ruimin says, “With the RenDanHeYi model, we move away from being something like an empire (with *the traditional closed pyramid*) to be more like a rainforest (with *an open networked platform*). Every empire will eventually collapse. A rainforest, on the other hand, can be sustained.”

Workplace democracy, like Semco, is certainly not mainstream. But it is not as uncommon as it sounds. And, Ricardo may be right. You can’t have both: the joy of a seven-day weekend and the luxury of firing a loaded gun. When you are under pressure to deliver quarter-on-quarter results, it is extremely difficult to resist the temptation of the loaded gun. It is as if you are constantly under a line of fire, and you pass on the pressure by executing the “my way or highway” dictum. This behaviour gets extended in the family setting as well. Seven-day weekenders remain a minority. At least for now.

Sources:

Ricardo Semler, “The seven-day weekend: A better to work in the 21^st century,” Arrow Books, 2003
Dr. Vrajlal Sapovadia and Akash Patel, “What works for workers’ cooperatives? An empirical research on success and failures of Indian Workers’ Cooperatives”, Jan 2013. Sapovadia, Vrajlal K., and Patel, Akash, What Works for Workers' Cooperatives? An Empirical Research on Success & Failure of Indian Workers' Cooperatives (January 15, 2013). Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2214563
Fathi Fakhfakh, Nathalie Magne, Thiabult Mirabel, Virginie Perotin, “Employee-owned firms in France,” Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership, July 19, 2023
Frank Martela and Sharda Nandram, “Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self‑managing teams but no middle managers,” Journal of Organization Design, January 2025.

At 91, dad asks, “Why isn’t anybody protesting?”

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 04:34:00 +0000

Baba turned 91 last week. I went to Mumbai from Bangalore to wish him and to perform our quarterly ritual of taking both to the family physician. This time dad fared better than mom. Her blockages in leg arteries are worsening, making it difficult for her to sleep. However, I am accustomed to situations where we ask, “How will they manage by themselves?” And yet they do, valuing their independence more than anything else.

Baba doesn’t do much these days. He is mostly on his bed, occasionally getting up to eat and visit the toilet. He ventures out once in a few months for a haircut, or to visit the doctor or his brother, or sister. He is still addicted to the newspaper, though – Loksatta if he is in Mumbai and The Hindu if he is in Bangalore with us. He also reads two magazines with a socialist leaning – Sadhana and Maha Anubhav. After he is done with reading the news, he has asked me many times, “Why is nobody protesting?” I don’t know the answer. I can only ask, “Why am I not protesting?”

Baba tells me that he has seen the rise of fascism in India since the 60s, before I was born. He worked at the Indian Cotton Mills Federation, perhaps the NASSCOM of textile industry, influencing the policy makers on behalf of the industry. He feels that the murder of Krishna Desai, a Communist Party leader, the then MLA, and a leader of mill workers’ union in 1970 was a turning point in the rise of fascism in Maharashtra. Three Shiv Sena party members were convicted and spent seven years in prison. Baba feels that a few textile oligarchs funded the assassination, and the then Congress Chief Minister Vasantrao Naik made money in the process. Barely three weeks after Desai’s death, Shiva Sena founder Bal Thackeray has said, “We must not miss a single opportunity to massacre communists wherever we find them."¹

The rise of fascism had its reflection in society. Vijay Tendulkar wrote the now-famous play “Ghashiram Kotwal” (1972) on the corrupt police chief of Pune serving the corrupt chief secretary Nana Phadanavis during the Peshwa dynasty in the 18^th century. I watched Ghashiram and read George Orwell’s Ninteen Eighty-Four while in school. Bombay gang wars also had their share of representation in the newspapers. I was in the 6^th grade when Dawood Ibrahim’s brother Shabir Kaskar was killed by Manya Surve at a petrol pump near our flat in Prabhadevi in 1981. Next year, Surve was killed in a police encounter, also remembered as Bombay’s first encounter killing. It provided masala to two Bollywood films – Amitabh starrer Agneepath and Shootout at Wadala. One of my school classmates joined the Rama Naik gang and one became a police inspector. I was too shy, skinny, and underweight to go towards either of the paths. However, I became aware of the brutal power of “the system,” which included mafia as a core element and the doctrine of “winning at any cost”. I was not convinced that protests could make a dent in such a powerful system.

As I flew from Buffalo, New York, to Bombay (now Mumbai) via perhaps Heathrow in December 1992, I watched the demolition of Babri Masjid telecast all over. I didn’t know that it would go down in history as the event that broke the secular backbone of India. When I landed in Bombay, the city was standstill and still burning. Riots that followed within a month changed the city forever. A few years later, our friend Iqbal narrated to us in Buffalo how his family literally ran from their house in Worli, not too far from our place.

But the event that saddened Baba the most was the assassination of Narendra Dabholkar in 2013. Our last name sake, he was a social activist, rationalist, and writer involved in the eradication of superstition in Maharashtra. Baba could visualize then how “the system” is going to capture India. Dabholkar’s assassination would be followed by Pansare (2015), Kalburgi (2015), and Gauri Lankesh (2017). CBI called these murders “a pre-planned act of terror”. Last year, eleven years later, two shooters got life imprisonment while the masterminds remain at large. People protested for some time and then stopped. I didn’t join any protests, didn’t even consider it. Why not? What were my biases?

I strongly felt that to navigate a crazy system, brute force doesn’t work. Shouting out can be detrimental. It is a miracle that Julian Assange survived five years in jail. What appealed to me the most is what I wrote about more than a decade ago in the backdrop of Anna Hazare-Kiran Bedi protests – the wisdom from “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest” – the first step is to be invisible. This is what Rana Ayyub did for eight months, God only knows how, before she could write Gujrat Files. And, unfortunately, this is what Hemant Karkare, the then head of Mumbai Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) couldn’t do as he began exposing the perpetrators of 2008 Malgaon bomb blasts. He was crushed by “the system” on the same day as 26/11 attacks and in a sophisticated manner, putting the blame on Pakistani terrorists².

My lack of enthusiasm for protests has another side. Protests assume (mostly, not always) that the world is “fixable”, like how we fix a car or a broken hip bone. What if it is more like cloud-fixing as opposed to clock-fixing? Mindfulness suggests that “fixing” the world can be a dangerous addiction. It is just an expression of the innate desire to mould the world to feel secure in an inherently insecure world. Sustained narrative to fix the world calcifies the belief that the world exists independent of me. What if it is not? If everything is indeed interconnected, and hence Sunya as Nagarjuna suggests, then seeing the sunyata (emptiness) must be primary. Without this insight, I carry hatred/anger against the bad world, sometimes deeply buried within. The society appears to be like a plumbing system to be fixed when things don’t flow in a desired way. And, insight can’t be engineered, either by protests or by force or by meditation, at least not yet.

My lack of belief in the power of protests has begun to shift recently. Protests against the ongoing wars, the proxy-war against Russia and the Israel-Palestine war looked pale initially and easily suppressible. However, in the past year or so the power of protests has surprised me. I also found the work done by Whitney Webb (One nation under blackmail vol 1 & 2), Lina Khan (Amazon’s antitrust paradox), and Francesca Albanese (From economy of occupation to economy of genocide) totally impressive in exposing the nexus between oligarchs, politicians, intelligence, and organized crime. I also admire the work of Indian YouTubers like Shyam Meera Singh, Kavya Karnatac, Mohak Mangal, Kunal Kamra, and Sheeba Fehmi in raising awareness on various aspects of the Deep State in India.

In March 1993, a few months after the Babri debacle, Vijay Tendulkar wrote a short fictional piece on Ghashiram Kotwal. In his dream, while traveling in Deccan Queen, Tendulkar meets Ghashiram in jeans and T-shirt. Ghashiram shows him his diary which, like Epstein’s black book, contains the names of top politicians and industrialists in India and beyond and tells him, “The entire democracy in this country is standing on the black money, top class weapons, and unpatriotic people like me. The Ghashiram in your play is running the country.” Two decades later Ghashiram’s clout has grown stronger. In 2025, India is ranked 151^st out of 180 countries in World press freedom index ranking.

Sources:

1. “Nativism in a metropolis: The Shiv Sena in Bombay”, Dipankar Gupta, Manohar, 1982, pg 159.

2. "Who killed Karkare? The real face of terrorism in India," S. M. Mushrif, Former I.G. Police, Maharashtra, Pharos Media, 2023

Image source: oneindia.com

Assessing journey-centric mindfulness against McMindfulness criticism

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 11:10:00 +0000

I have been teaching Journey-centric mindfulness (JCM) over the past decade. My book “Mindfulness: connecting with the real you” was published half a decade ago in 2019. Yesterday I conducted a mindfulness workshop at home for free, as I have done for the past seven years. Last month, I wrote my key takeaways from Ronald Purser’s critique, “McMindfuless: How mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality”. How does journey-centric mindfulness (JCM) fare when assessed through the lens of McMindfulness criticism? That is what I will explore in this article. For a more detailed treatment of this assessment, please refer to our paper, “A critical review of journey-centric mindfulness” which was presented at the International Research Conference on Mindfulness at IIM Bodh Gaya last year (IRCM-2024).

Journey-centric mindfulness: JCM is a journey (process) of learning to see clearly despite biased thinking anytime anywhere (even on the go). JCM is a lifelong journey without any destination. What is it that we are learning to see clearly? Primarily, three characteristics of existence (Pali: tilakkhanā, Sanskrit: trilakśanā): repetitive wasteful thinking (dukkha), impermanence (Pali: anicca, Sanskrit: anitya), and non-independence of self (Pali: anatta, Sanskrit: anatma). JCM is a secular form of mindfulness. It does not prescribe any belief system or practice as mandatory.

Now, let’s assess JCM McMindfulness lens, especially the three points from the criticism as presented in my earlier article.

Crisis is in the head: Purser is saying that large corporations like Google, Meta, (erstwhile) Twitter, and Apple are manipulating our attention. In his words, “Mindfulness has, like positive psychology, and the broader happiness industry, depoliticized and privatized stress. If we are unhappy about being unemployed, losing our health insurance, and seeing our children incur massive debt through college loan, it is our responsibility to learn to be more mindful.” JCM suggests that stress is a side-effect of repetitive, compulsive thinking that is largely wasteful. As we learn to see clearly the movement of thought, its wasteful nature, and its gullibility to social media, the movement of thought slows down. As a result, one may reduce one’s dependence on social media. JCM is primarily about seeing, not doing. JCM doesn’t say anything about what one should or should not do. In fact, it assumes “clarity is action”. One can be a social activist, a corporate executive, or a monk and be on a journey of learning to see clearly. JCM suggests that an action when one sees clearly is likely to be more appropriate than an action when one’s perception is distorted. Of course, nothing is guaranteed.

Tool for self-improvement: JCM assumes that mind is like weather - highly non-linear and deeply hierarchical. The weather analogy is borrowed from a neuroscientist Prof. Karl Friston of University College London¹. A small change can make a big difference. A small SMS can change the state of mind from peaceful to raging anger in a short time. Do we talk about a tool for weather improvement? No. Similarly, JCM assumes that self-improvement is a meaningless concept as far as the mind is concerned. Thus, doing mindfulness in order to reach a peaceful or blissful state is meaningless. Then why should we learn to see clearly? To appreciate this, let’s ask - Why do we keep the windshield of our car clean? Is it to reach a destination? Or without a clean windshield, it is difficult to make appropriate decisions. Since JCM doesn’t subscribe to self-improvement, this aspect of McMindfulness criticism is not relevant to JCM.

Secular approach without wisdom: JCM is a secular approach. However, it is influenced by and borrows from Buddhist Vipassana as well as Nagarjuna’s Sunyata. The wisdom aspect is at the heart of JCM. Learning to see impermanence AND interconnectedness is emphasized. Anicca and anatta are crucial. Learning to see that absolute necessities are a meaningless concept is important. And the self is nothing but a collection of absolute necessities – body ownership, possessions, name, fame ownership, etc. Each has a role in life. But nothing is permanent, and nothing is context-independent. These insights don’t come easily, and even when they come, they are not easy to digest. Seeing self-deception clearly can make one uncomfortable or even angry. It may result in quitting the job. It can also make one peaceful. Since learning to see impermanence and Sunyata is at the heart of JCM, it is more like a secular approach with wisdom.

Since JCM doesn’t have a destination such as a stress-free life, higher productivity, or more profit, it is not sold to corporations. I do conduct some sessions as part of IIM Bangalore’s executive education program occasionally (twice this year so far).

In short, JCM stands tall when reviewed through the lens of McMindfulness criticism. It may not appeal to many, especially corporates, because it doesn’t promise anything. However, the shallowness of one’s life may motivate people to explore mindfulness. And, JCM can be practiced by grabbing moments in one’s busy schedule, even on the go. Why not give it a shot?

Notes:

1. Mind is like weather: This analogy is explored by Prof. Karl Friston in the interview “Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle | Lex Fridman podcast #99” (39:15). Friston compares the attributes common between brain and weather – deeply structured, very non-linear, and rests upon non-equilibrium steady-state dynamics.

My key takeaways from Ronald Purser’s McMindfulness

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 09:17:00 +0000

Ronald Purser feels that the current mindfulness fad is the entrepreneurial equivalent of McDonald’s. Spiritual salesmen are commoditizing mindfulness and making money by marketing it as a more efficient, calculable, predictable, and controlled form of meditation for improving mental fitness. “One invests in mindfulness as one would invest in a stock hoping to receive a handsome dividend,” says Purser in the book “McMindfulness: How mindfulness became thenew capitalist spirituality”. As a mindfulness teacher and author of a book on the subject, I was attracted to the book to understand Purser’s criticism as well as to check how my teaching stands against Purser polemic. In this article, I will summarize the key points from the book and in a subsequent article, I will write my response to Purser’s critique as well as assessment of journey-led mindfulness that I teach against the critique.

Which mindfulness? Before we look at Purser’s criticism, let’s understand what is the form of mindfulness Purser is putting under the scanner. It includes Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) an 8-week therapeutic intervention championed by Jon Kabat-Zinn initially in a clinical setting and subsequently expanded to corporations, schools, government, and the military. Purser also looks at corporate mindfulness programs such as Google’s “Search Inside Yourself” which was subsequently spun off as a leadership institute.

The mindfulness under review here is “nothing more than basic concentration training. Although derived from Buddhism, it’s been stripped of the teachings on ethics that accompanied it, as well as the liberating aim of dissolving attachment to a false sense of self while enacting compassion for all other beings.” It involves paying attention to the present moment, non-judgmentally. And, shifting from “doing” mode to “being” mode.

Now, let’s look at Purser’s key arguments.

Crisis is in the head: Purser feels that giant corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple are monetizing and manipulating our attention. Rather than looking at this aspect, mindfulness champions are telling people to go inward, be in the present moment and let go of judgments. He says, “Mindfulness has, like positive psychology, and the broader happiness industry, depoliticized and privatized stress. If we are unhappy about being unemployed, losing our health insurance, and seeing our children incur massive debt through college loan, it is our responsibility to learn to be more mindful.” “We are repeatedly sold the same message that individual action is the only real way to solve social problems, so we should take responsibility.” Purser feels this approach stifles critical and radical thinking.

Tool for self-improvement: We are told that if we practice mindfulness and get our individual lives in order, we can be happy and secure. Google’s “Search Inside Yourself” program champion Meng promises, “Mindfulness can increase my happiness without changing anything else.” Jon Kabat-Zinn is quoted in the book saying, “Mindfulness may actually be the only promise the species and the planet have for making it through the next couple of hundred years.” David Gelles, author of Mindful work, says in his book, “Mindfulness can be a source of employer value proposition and may in the long run provide organizations with a valuable tool to manage high burnout levels of employees.”

What’s wrong if all this could actually happen? Purser points out that the scientific evidence for these improvements is poor. Thupten Jinpa, The Dalai Lama’s interpreter and a PhD from the University of Cambridge says, “The scientific study of meditation and its effects is very rudimentary.” Another scientist is quoted saying that there is convincing evidence that mindfulness studies suffer from positive reporting bias, suggesting therapies are more effective than they really are. “Mind the hype” an article authored by fifteen researchers says, “As mindfulness has increasingly pervaded every aspect of contemporary society, so have misunderstandings about what it is, whom it helps, and how it affects the mind and brain. At a practical level, the misinformation and propagation of poor research methodology can potentially lead to people being harmed, cheated, disappointed, and/or disaffected.”

Secular approach without ethics or wisdom: While the secular mindfulness programs have their roots in Vipassana tradition, Purser feels that the ethics and wisdom part of Buddhism has been kept out. He says, “The claim that major ethical changes intrinsically follow from ‘paying attention to the present moment, non-judgmentally’ is patently flawed.” In Buddhist tradition, right mindfulness is one of Buddha’s eightfold path along with right perception, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, and concentration. Purser points out that secular mindfulness programs leave other seven things out. Buddhism also points to the constructed self or the insight of interdependence or pratitya-samutpada. To see that the feeling of independent self is a cognitive illusion is an important aspect of Buddhist teaching. Many mindfulness programs, especially in the clinical settings, leave this part out. If mindfulness helps you to connect with the real you, then what do you do after that? If you simply bliss out and accept injustice, how is it different from being a drug addict, sedated into zombified oblivion? Purser asks.

Purser’s suggestions: He feels that a truly revolutionary mindfulness would challenge the western sense of entitlement to happiness irrespective of ethical conduct. He feels mindfulness should aim towards individual and collective “conscience explosion,” converting exhaustion, depression, and burnout into constructive forms of activism. It should move towards personal, social, and ecological liberation. It should combine spiritual practice with radical action. By first witnessing shared vulnerabilities and acknowledging social suffering it should develop collective capacities for resistance by building trust and empathy.

Contrarian aspects of my life: no-religion, no-job, no-certification

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 11:01:00 +0000

India is a populous country. There is a competition for resources on the road, for buses, for college admission, for jobs, in hospitals, cricket match tickets, temples, and even in crematoriums. A contrarian position helps reduce the fight and eases life to some degree.

I learned driving while in the US, and when I returned to India in Bangalore in 1998, I realized driving here needs a whole set of new skills. For example, taking a right turn onto a main road was a nightmare for me. I kept waiting for someone to let me in, and became a target of serious honking from behind. I was no match for the swiftness and guts of the autowalla who used to become impatient waiting behind me. Soon, I found a trick. I started letting the auto move ahead, and I began following him. That was much easier. But I had a bigger Aha moment a few months later.

I realized the streets are empty when there is a cricket match on TV. I had not followed cricket for almost a decade by then. I started driving the family around during that time. We visited Gangarams, movie theatres, Ulsoor lake, HAL museum, Cubbon Park, etc. I began to learn the benefits of a contrarian position. Now, I haven’t watched cricket for a quarter of a century. Subsequently, I ended up taking contrarian positions much bigger than don’t-follow-cricket position, some by design, many others by circumstances. Here are three of them: No-religion, no-job, and no-certification.

No-religion: By the time I returned to India, I was convinced that the process of becoming is an illusion created and sustained by society and the culture. You must become successful by acquiring name, fame, and wealth – has been the dominant narrative. Hindu religion, with which I had a loose sense of belonging, is no exception. Right from birth to death, a set of rituals is “mandatory” so that “all will be well” for you during this and future births. That is the grand promise. For me, it looked like a crooked game being played by a small community, mostly Brahmins, for millennia. I lost interest in becoming anyone, and as a side effect, the grand promise of the Hindu religion looked meaningless to me.

For the past two decades, I haven’t been participating in any rituals – birth and death included. No idol worship, no temple visit, and no expenditure on anything remotely ritualistic. Over the last ten days, Gauri and I travelled from Dehradun to Ghangaria in Bhyundar valley. We trekked to the Valley of Flowers and to the Hemkund Sahib gurudwara. We have no plans of visiting any of the Char Dhams including Badrinath where most of the crowd is headed. Sometimes, I don’t have a choice, in which case I just chill out nearby. For example, when Gauri visited Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi, I went to Mani Karnika ghat nearby and watched the sunrise. At the Puri temple, I looked after her belongings outside. Yesterday, when Gauri visited the oldest temple of Rishikesh, Bharat temple, I managed to strike a conversation with the school-going fourth graders about what they liked in school (they said – playing, except one girl who said she likes studies).

I continue to be a serious student of Upanishads, especially Katha Upanishad (my blog), that of Nagarjuna’s Sunyata as depicted in the 2^nd-3^rd century text Mulamadhyamaka Karika (my blog), and Ramana Maharshi’s UpadesaSaram (my blog), none of it requires me to belong to a religion. I study these texts in Sanskrit. When the Government census guys visited us in 2011, I asked them if they had “no religion” as an option. They didn’t. So, I got counted as a Hindu.

No-job: I have been a big beneficiary of capitalist structures. I worked for a decade after finishing my studies, two years in the US and eight years in Bangalore. I got stock options, and after IPO, I sold them and it helped in partial repayment of the home loan. I have been debt-free for the past fifteen years. However, capitalism demands that every for-profit company keep growing revenue, profits, and shareholder value. Given my disregard for the process of becoming, I realized it is better to step away from the corporate world and make a living independently without any pressure for growth. I quit my job in 2006, and I have been freelancing ever since. I still needed to pay the bills and work around the inflation. Moreover, I had to stand out from the crowd, market myself, create a niche, and deliver value. That’s not easy. I got lucky, got good collaborators, and kept getting assignments from for-profit, not-for-profit, and government organizations.

What’s in a name? One may ask. But the name I ended up giving for my consulting practice – Catalign Innovation Consulting acted as a beacon. It implied three things I would do: One, my primary role would be a catalyst – someone who helps an individual or teams move from intent to impact effectively. The primary role won’t be an activist driving an agenda of my own, won’t be a solution provider, and won’t be a knowledge imparting teacher. Two, I would be helpful in aligning strategy and execution. And three, I would help organizations in their innovation journey.

Can innovation capacity building become obsolete, making me redundant? Sure, it can. However, if I look around, I see some of the innovation world leaders struggling right now, like Intel, Boeing, even Apple. Indian companies – both startups and established players are under pressure to innovate, especially in deep-tech innovation. I clearly see an opportunity in innovation capacity building in India at least for another decade, perhaps more. I also see myself playing a role in raising awareness on the dark side of innovation – using innovation towards predatory practices allegedly used by big corporates like Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, Flipkart, etc. In short, I don’t see any dearth of opportunities right now.

No-certification: Indian society is obsessed with certificates. If you have a certificate from a prestigious institute, good for you, or better still if it is from a foreign institute. The obsession is understandable given the number of applications for any position and the number of bogus certificates floating around. I have been a big beneficiary of two certificates, one a bachelor’s of technology from IIT Bombay and the other, a doctorate from University at Buffalo, USA, both in Computer Science. I got my last certificate in 1996, almost thirty years ago. And then I decided to stop playing the certification game. I let my writing and my work become my credentials. This is a contrarian position, given that the three areas I work in: innovation capacity building, design thinking, and mindfulness have very little to with Computer Science. I have no certificate in any of these areas. My father finds it odd how I make a living by claiming expertise in areas in which I carry no certificate.

One implication of no-certification is that I don’t take an existing framework (or a case study for that matter) and adapt it. For example, I don’t do a certification in executive coaching or I do not do a certification from a foreign product management program and resell it in India. These are great and lucrative business models. But I don’t go there. I only work with my frameworks published through my books and blogs. Of course, these frameworks are created by building on top of existing studies and frameworks, and they are given due credit (each chapter of our innovation book has an average of 35 references).

All my frameworks have one common assumption that is uncommon. They assume a biased-agent model versus a rational-agent model. If a president, a prince, or a portfolio manager participates in underage sex trafficking, it can happen only under a biased mental model. I was blown away when I heard Daniel Kahneman say, “Rational agent model is a non-starter” more than a decade ago, and it stuck.

To summarize, no-religion, no-job, and no-certification are some of the contrarian positions in my life. They have helped me navigate life relatively smoothly so far.

image source: Gemini AI

My reading list and themes for 2025 - strategy, wars, and stock investing

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 07:19:00 +0000

I read mostly fiction last year – revisiting Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, etc. This year, it is non-fiction and revolves around three themes: strategy, wars, and stock investing. Let me start with strategy.

Strategy: So far, strategy has played a supporting role in my work on the management of technology and innovation. And I have been thinking about how I can strengthen that part. Apart from revisiting the strategy books I read more than a decade ago like “Understanding Michael Porter” by Joan Magretta, “Co-opetition” by Nalebuff and Brandenburger and “Good strategy, bad strategy” by Richard Rumelt, I plan to read “Playing to win: How strategy really works” by A. G. Lafley and Roger Martin and “The Crux: How leaders become strategists” by Richard Rumelt. I have already listened to podcast interviews of Roger Martin and Rumelt.

Who rules the world? Wars are the new normal, and I realized my understanding of the real forces behind these prolonged wars is at best superficial. This is likely to be a vast ocean, and there is a chance that I get even more confused after reading a few books. Nevertheless, I plan to read the following two books as a starting point: “The new rulers of the world” by John Pilger and “Who rules the world?” by Noam Chomsky. If the essence of Pilger’s writing is that, “Imperial power wielded by rich states and multinational corporations, led by the US, is far more destructive than any terrorist organization,” and if Noam Chomsky is saying, “US is world’s biggest terrorist”, I am curious.

Stock investing: I opened an online trading account more than twenty years ago. It was a joint account with my mother, who was keen to learn the game. Soon I realized our approaches to investing are diametrically opposite – she likes to buy and sell the same day (or a few days later) while I was more interested in an investment horizon of 2-3 years. So, we split our accounts. She is now 88 and still going strong with her trading. In contrast, I lost interest in a few years and eventually turned to mutual funds, thanks to advice from friends like Ravi Aranke. My mom kept nudging me to get back to it. It has been six months since my interest was renewed. Now, I know that it is extremely difficult to beat the index. However, I am interested in finding out if I can manage to follow Buffett’s rule number one – Not to lose money and enjoy the process. I have started small and averaged one trade a week since December 11, 2024 (all buys so far).

This year, I re-read Peter Lynch classic “One up on wall street” and Joel Greenblatt’s “The little book that beats the market”. Also, read Parag Parikh’s “Value investing and behavioral finance”, Mohnish Pabrai’s “The dhando investor”, and Phil Town’s “Rule #1: The simple strategy for successful investing”. I am hoping to finish Pat Dorsey’s “Fives rules of successful stock investing” (half-way through), Aswath Damodaran’s “Narrative and numbers” and Tim Koller’s classic “Valuation”. Listening to podcast interviews of Dalal Street legends like Manish Chokhani, Rajeev Thakkar, Sankaran Naren, Sunil Singhania, Ramesh Damani, Sanjay Bakshi, Madhu Kela, and leading asset managers like Ravi Dharamshi, Amit Jeswani, Arvind Kothari, and Samit Vartak has been a big help. While I admired the legends, I was also impressed by the young investors (in their 30s) like Amit Jeswani for mastering the one-year horizon game and Arvind Kothari for demonstrating what scuttlebutt investing means in the Indian context. Outside India, I enjoyed listening to US tech-investor Dan Niles for his AI perspective and the Swiss investor Felix Zulauf for his macro perspective.

I like what Mohnish Pabrai says (58:55), “Life has no meaning. We are here for a short time. And a lot of randomness in life. I don’t think there is a grand plan.” And when Sonia asks him, “If life has no meaning, why do people chase fame, money, success?” Mohnish answers, “They haven’t thought about it. And that’s why I became a game player. To pass the time, just do interesting things that you are excited about. And I am excited about playing games.” I have been in the life-has-no-meaning camp for a long time, playing different games that I enjoy. Now, I am exploring if the stock-investing game is something I can enjoy by keeping a margin of safety.

Some of these books will be read fast, and others will involve slow reading (see reading, fast and slow), taking notes, and updating frameworks. Chances are high, I won’t finish the list this year. Who cares?

Strategic management of technology and innovation 2024: A reflection

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 12:59:00 +0000

In the last few months (Sep-Nov) I got an opportunity to teach “Strategic management of technology and innovation” (SMTI) at IIM Bangalore to EPGP, PGP, and PGPBA students. In a fast-changing technology world, SMTI kept me on my toes even though I was teaching it for the sixth time in the last six years. It was a period when genAI hype had begun to settle down, all tech giants had taken positions in humanoids, and AMD under Lisa Su was doing much better than Intel. Here are a few things that stand out as I reflect on what I learned.

The increasing role of start-ups: Traditionally, Indian companies have focused more on operational excellence and relied on long-term partnerships for technology development and innovation. For example, Tata-Hitachi (construction material), TVS-Suzuki (two-wheelers), Amara Raja Batteries (ARBL)-Johnson controls (battery technologies), etc. However, over the past two decades, some Indian companies have shifted gears in their technology strategy. Some have set up / strengthened their in-house R&D (e.g. ARBL). Moreover, over the past decade, the center of gravity of innovation has shifted towards start-ups and they seem to be playing an increasingly important role in how large companies are managing technology and innovation. Reliance acquired Faradion from the UK in the Sodium-Ion battery space and has invested in the robotics company Addverb, Titan acquired Hyderabad-based HUG innovations to scale the digital watch business, fertilizer player Coromandel Intl is a majority stakeholder in Chennai-based drone startup Dhaksha. Over the past five years, Maruti Suzuki has onboarded 18 startups as business partners through its accelerator. With the startup ecosystem maturing in India, this trend is likely to grow.

Innovation-related disclosures in annual reports: Disclosure of intellectual capital or innovation dashboard in annual reports is not a statutory requirement in India. However, several companies present various parameters such as new products launched, R&D expenses, patents filed/granted, automation achievements, digital onboarding (in banking and insurance space), etc. Some companies also mention continuous improvement-related metric. In fact, in many annual reports, there is a separate section called intellectual capital where this information is presented. There is no consistency in these disclosures, however, it give some idea as to what is important to the company as far as innovation is concerned. For example, please see some of the innovation dashboards from Tata Motors, Asian Paints, SBI Life, and Zomato. I feel a lot can be learned about innovation from these disclosures.

Role of genAI: Unlike last year, genAI tools were no longer a curiosity. They had become part of an accepted toolset. Students were openly discussing it. I can’t say I used it extensively while preparing for the course. However, I found it useful in getting pointers for further study. For example, while studying AMD’s strategy during the last decade, ChatGPT gave useful tips. However, I relied a lot more on annual reports, earnings calls, CXO interviews, etc. I thought the assignments might be a high-scoring match given the access to genAI tools. I am sure the tools were used extensively by students. However, it didn’t guarantee quality reports and there was a lot of variation in the quality of answers and referencing. Let’s see how this aspect evolves going forward.

Guest lectures: We had two guest lectures bringing in a fresh industry perspective. The first one was from Dr. Balvinder Singh who is a leader in camera/vision/XR technology and is credited with Samsung smartphone camera global leadership from Galaxy S3-S24. He presented how camera development especially the role of software has evolved in the past decade. He also shared the important role open innovation is playing for companies like Samsung.

The second guest lecture was from Sunil Mishra, who has decades of experience developing banking products. Sunil gave an overview of the rapidly evolving digital banking ecosystem in India and associated product innovations. Who would have thought India would have virtual or neo banks with no physical branches so soon?

Overall, SMTI-24 was a great learning experience for me. Hope it was the same for students.

Poor customer experience vs poorly-working business model – which is easier to fix?

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 09:16:00 +0000

Given two companies – A – with poor customer experience, and good business model, and B – with good customer experience and non-working business model - where would you bet? Of course, most people would not like to bet on either. But, let’s say you have to choose between the two. Which one would you choose? I asked this question in my class sometime last year. In a class of forty, all except one or two students chose B. That is, they felt it was easier to fix a business model than customer experience. Since then, I have repeated the question multiple times. While the response has never been as lopsided as the first time, there are enough takers for A and B in most cases. Let’s explore the question in this article.

People choosing option B feel that fixing customer experience involves external variables while fixing a business model is internal and hence easier. Option-A guys feel that the business model is deeply entrenched in the company’s guts and hence more difficult to fix. I began this exploration with a bias for option A. I was influenced by the Dunzo case I discussed in class.

We discussed Dunzo’s customer journey and used it to illustrate journey mapping and how Dunzo enhanced its customer experience. While customer experience improved for Dunzo, it struggled on the business model front. For the first few years, its business model relied on partnerships with local stores from whom goods would be sourced as per customer demand. Post 2021 it tried to emulate the quick commerce players like Zepto and Blinkit by moving to a dark store model. This business model is capital intensive, and the unit economics went from bad to worse and Dunzo ended up losing eight rupees for every rupee earned in FY23. Eventually, Dunzo had to shut down.

It was not difficult to find more cases like Dunzo's where a company couldn’t save itself while fixing its business model. WeWork (global), Kingfisher Airlines, and Micromax all had good customer experience and a decent market position. However, they couldn’t save themselves from going bankrupt by making changes to their business model.

What about a similar situation for companies with poor customer experience (option A) and not able to make it? It is easier to start with extreme cases. One area to look at is to see product recalls due to health hazards. This happened to Philips in 2021 when it had to recall more than 5.5 million sleep apnea devices due to the potential dispersion of carcinogenic substances during its operation. It had to spend $1.1 billion to settle the claims. Its valuation dropped to one-fourth of what it was before this incident. It is gaining the lost ground slowly.

Closer home, Ola Electric is facing a barrage of customer complaints and service issues related to its e-scooter. Unlike Philips, Ola Electric isn’t a case of product recall, at least not yet. However, the number of complaints is so high (more than 10,000) that various regulatory bodies like the Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) are stepping in and investigating the situation. At this point, it doesn’t appear that Ola Electric is going the Dunzo way. It is holding on to around 30% market share so far. It is likely to bounce back.

Does it mean that fixing a poor customer experience can be challenging but usually not fatal? In contrast, a non-working business model can be fatal? Yes, these are possibilities. However, my bias may still be operational and more study is required.

Insights from a serial entrepreneur – Gupshup CEO, Beerud Sheth’s perspective

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 04:35:00 +0000

If we are lucky, we meet one or two people in our lifetime who appear to be coming from a different planet. For me, it has been Beerud Sheth, a classmate, Gupshup CEO, and a serial entrepreneur. He can easily think twenty steps ahead sometimes spanning twenty years. It was an honour to host Beerud in my class last April at IIT Bombay. Beerud shared his insights from starting two companies Elance, and Gupshup. Elance, a pioneer of online freelancing and gig economy, is now publicly listed on the NY Stock Exchange as Upwork. Gupshup is a leading player in the conversational internet ecosystem. Here are my three takeaways from Beerud’s talk:

Don’t carry entitlement: Beerud’s biggest piece of advice was, “IIT entitlement is all bogus”. When students excel in academics in premier institutes they start carrying an entitlement mindset regarding jobs, salaries, and life in general. “You are not entitled to anything… There are no guarantees,” said Beerud. He experienced this firsthand when he started Elance in 1999. By then he had excelled at IIT (class-topper), MIT, and in his job at Wall Street. He and his co-founders raised money initially from friends and family and subsequently through Series A. However, within a few months dotcom bust happened. Elance had to let go of half the engineers. And situation remained tough not for months, but for years after that. Beerud suggested that the sooner we get rid of this entitlement mindset the better. Otherwise, it may create a significant psychological burden.
Be close to where the action is: If the first takeaway highlighted what not to do, the second one suggested what to do – be close to where the action is and do something interesting, and value-adding. Beerud highlighted one particular action that he chose to be close to – a paradigm shift or a platform shift. In the 90s when Beerud was thinking about starting a venture, the Internet was the paradigm shift. And the action was in Silicon Valley – that is where Beerud chose to be. Netscape, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay – those were the hot names. A lot of interesting opportunities get created around a paradigm shift. In contrast, India was a terrible place as far as action related to the Internet shift was concerned in the early to mid-90s. Of course, things have changed since then and now there is action in India, especially in Bombay, Bangalore, and Delhi.
Conversational Internet will be big: If you think of a chatbot as a new website and messaging app like WhatsApp as a browser, then you can see this as a new kind of Internet, says Beerud. And we have seen how big the web got. And Beerud feels that the movie is being played all over again. Billions of websites and trillion-dollar companies were created out of it. So this new Internet will also create multiple services and multiple companies. All of this got a big boost last year with the rise of LLMs. Instead of structured interactions, you have AI-powered natural language interactions. We have seen the keyboard-and-mouse of the PC revolution and the touch screen of the mobile revolution and now, we are seeing the conversational interface of the current AI revolution. This bridges the digital divide as the grandma and people in remote rural villages can access the Internet through conversation in a natural language. This is what a platform shift looks like. Now, everything you know about the Internet has to be rebuilt and reinvented around the conversational AI ecosystem. The use cases will remain the same, entertainment, shopping, learning, etc. But AI agents will be the key players in this game doing the iterative conversational interaction showing multiple options while shopping. We will have an AI shopkeeper, an AI bank manager, an AI educator, a therapist, a travel guide, etc. And it will be multimodal – text, images, audio, video, metaverse with AR/VR, etc. This is where Beerud’s company Gupshup is betting big on.

It was a great talk. Students really enjoyed his stories and nuggets of wisdom. Thanks, Beerud for sharing your insights, and wishing you and Gupshup all the best!

My favourite quotes from Daniel Kahneman

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 10:51:00 +0000

One of my heroes, Daniel Kahneman, passed away last month at the age of 90. Ever since I heard his talk on YouTube on “Marvels and flaws of human intuition” sometime in 2009, I became his fan. I listened to the talk like how people listen to a music album again and again. A couple of years later, his book “Thinking, fast and slow” was published and soon he became a celebrity. I continued to listen to his interviews. I ended up using the biased-agent model rather than the rational-agent model in all my work related to innovation capacity & culture building, design thinking, and mindfulness. In this article, I would like to present four of my favourite quotes from Kahneman.

Rational agent model is a non-starter: I remember hearing this from Kahneman in multiple interviews over the past decade and it created a deep impression in my mind. He said in this interview last year (April 14, 2023): “Consistency of beliefs and preferences, which are the essence of rationality in that model — it's important to see what it implies. It's not the same thing as reasoning correctly, that is, of saying two things that are consistent with each other in the same conversation. It's that your beliefs, the whole system, your beliefs and preferences, taken one at a time, make up a consistent system. And that is psychologically a non-starter. That's simply because our beliefs and our preferences are so context-dependent and the context is highly specific and momentary, that this type of consistency is not conceivable.” So beautifully put.

Cognitive biases act like optical illusions: I mentioned this quote along with the cartoon below three years ago while presenting a working definition of mindfulness. In “Thinking, fast and slow” he says “Cognitive illusions can be more stubborn than visual illusions”. Kahneman is not suggesting that we don’t change our mind. He says, “To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters." And, he elaborates this with, “I think I'm actually known for changing my mind. This is one of the traits that all my collaborators complain about, because I keep changing my mind. But I keep changing my mind about small things. Then what I discovered actually, in part while preparing that talk on adversarial collaboration, there are things on which I just won't change my mind. Some of these I've believed since I was 17 or 18, so certainly are not going to change now.” We could be deeply attached to a religion, national identity, political ideologies, and even scientific theories. My guess is that Kahneman would have been deeply saddened by the way Israel-Gaza conflict has unfolded since the last October, demonstrating the stubbornness of cognitive illusions.

Focus on the process, not the outcome: We live in a world where successful outcome is worshipped. Individual net worth, startup valuations, election results, winning IPLs, competitive exam scores, your position, and possessions, etc. Schools teaching entrepreneurship have a vision of producing a certain number of unicorns. Kahneman knew that this lopsided emphasis on outcome is a mistake. He said, “The key feature of decision-making under uncertainty is that there is no perfect correlation between the quality of decisions and quality of outcomes. You could make a good decision and fail and you could make a bad decision and succeed.” And he advises later in the talk, “Try to focus on the process, and not on the outcome”. For more on this, check out my blog “Rewarding innovation: process vs outcome”.

Human mind does not deal well with nonevents: I am sure I must have encountered nonevents before I read about them in “Thinking, fast and slow”. But since then, they have become a large part of my life. I see them all the time everywhere. After narrating Google’s success story, Kahneman says, “There is a very good story here. Fleshed out in more detail, the story could give you the sense that you understand what made Google succeed; it would also make you feel that you have learned a valuable general lesson about what makes businesses succeed. Unfortunately, there is good reason to believe that your sense of understanding and learning from the Google story is largely illusory. The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance. No story of Google’s unlikely success will meet that test, because no story can include the myriad of events that would have caused a different outcome. The human mind does not deal well with nonevents.” Now, every moment events appear to be a tiny fraction of nonevents, most of them my mind is not even capable of fathoming. My mom’s fall from her bed in the old age home a couple of days ago was a lucky event because today she can walk to the dining hall on her own.

image source: etinsights.et-edge.com

Psychedelics-mindfulness relationship: My 3 takeaways from Roland Griffiths' perspective

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 16:17:00 +0000

This week I got an opportunity to conduct a mindfulness session for IIT Bombay students thanks to my friend Prof. Devdip Purkayastha. One student asked, “How are psychedelics related to mindfulness?” This was not the first time the topic of psychedelics was raised in my mindfulness session. Questions like this prompted me to study the scientific literature on the subject over the past 2-3 years and what I found was quite fascinating. In this article, I would like to present my 3 takeaways from the Rolland Griffiths interview with Tara Barch titled “Meditation, psychedelics, mortality: A conversation with Tara and Roland Griffiths”. Roland Griffiths (1946-2023) was a professor of psychopharmacology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and is sometimes called the person who led a renaissance in psychedelics research over the past two decades.

Neuroscience of psychedelics and meditation is in its infancy: When asked, “Can you give us just a brief bit of the science, the common pathways that thus far is thought between how psychedelics work in the brain and how meditation works in the brain? Like how do they both have the effects they have of giving us that enlarged sense of being?” (45:05) Rolland responds, “One answer to that is our understanding of that is truly primitive,” and then he adds, “The neuroscience of understanding how these experiences unfold with both psychedelics and meditation is exciting, there's a lot of research going on, but again, it's at its infancy”. “One of the most intriguing things that bring meditation and psychedelics together is the observation that acute psychedelics produce a decrease in the functioning of something called the default mode network (DMN).” (46:27) This large-scale brain network is known to be active while one is engaged in self-referential thinking (past, future, social evaluation, moral reasoning, etc). DMN is also known to be less active during mindfulness practice involving attentional focus on body sensations and breath, etc. However, DMN is not an anatomically well-defined term and its function and its relationship with psychedelics and mindfulness is an active research area.

Psychedelics-based guided therapy could act as a crash course in mindfulness: This is how Roland describes the instructions given to subjects undergoing psilocybin-based guided therapy at his lab – “We tell people, you're going to have this experience, it may or may not be pleasant. It can take all kinds of shapes and forms. There may be visualizations, there may not be. And all we want you to do is pay attention to that experience, be present with it. We're here to support you should you start feeling uncomfortable but we're going to continue to ask you to go back in. And then we forewarn people about these experiences can be very, very difficult and we'll give a metaphor. We'll say, so, for instance, with psilocybin you can get a lot of visualization and so as a thought experiment let's suppose a demonic figure appears within your consciousness and this is something more terrifying than you can imagine, it's made by you, for you. And your natural impulse is going be to run or to fight it and you want to do neither of those two. You want to just recognize it as an object of consciousness.” (21:06) If people learn to stay with such an intense experience without getting drawn in, they feel empowered in a way that they didn’t believe is possible before. Roland feels these instructions “amount to a crash course in mindfulness” (21:06) and he calls it “meditation on steroids”. (24:43)

There is no stability in psychedelics-based investigation and is riskier than mindfulness: Both psychedelics and mindfulness enable investigation of the nature of mind. Both are risky. Roland says, “There are a couple of significant risks that can come out of psychedelic exposure, and first and foremost is that people under unsupervised conditions, unscreened conditions can just engage in dangerous behaviour and they can get disoriented, they can get panicked, they can be confused to the point that they do themselves or others significant harm. And so, these have to occur under conditions that discourage that. But apart from that, there are biological predispositions that would seem to be very unfavourable.” (42:10) He adds, “My view is that the only way to achieve stability in this investigation of nature of mind is through practices such as meditation or other embodied practices and psychedelics can be misleading and certainly don't, in my judgment, represent a path in and of themselves because there is just no stability in it. And then certainly some people can get caught in the grasping for the experience and that could derail them. And then there are certainly more risks involved in the use of psychedelics than there are in meditation.” (37:55)

While writing this article, I came across a recent New York Times article “The psychedelic evangelist” that mentions that a former colleague of Roland has filed a complaint against Roland for running his research lab like a new-age retreat centre with religious symbolism and steering volunteers towards the outcome he wanted. It is also alleged that the drugs come with unpredictable risks, such as psychotic episodes, increased suicidality, or extended emotional difficulties, which are most likely underreported by his research lab.

Do these questions related to unethical research practices change my takeaways? No. The three takeaways are quite conservative and Roland certainly didn’t appear like a “salesman” for psychedelics in this interview which occurred while he was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer. I haven’t used any psychedelics personally yet but I am curious about these developments as Roland says, “I see them (psychedelics and meditation) as just very close cousins, and there really may be value of much better investigation of how psychedelics can facilitate the exploration of the nature of mind when put into context of meditation.” (39:15)

In a subsequent article, I plan to explore a unified framework called the REBUS hypothesis (Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics) proposed by Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston.

image source: wikipedia.org

Culture of innovation: 4 attributes and 3 kinds of evidence

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 04:13:00 +0000

Last month I got an opportunity to conduct a session on “Fostering a culture of innovation” for Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) business owners in Bangalore organized by Essae Chandran Institute. We began by exploring the following question. “Assume there is a magic wand that has created a culture of innovation in your organization today. What new stuff will you notice when you go back?” It took some time before participants started responding with “passion”, “curiosity”, “ideas”, etc. Culture is a fluffy stuff and it helps to have something more tangible in recognizing whether it is innovative. In this article, I would like to present four attributes and three kinds of evidence that may give an indication of an innovative culture.

Curiosity: Curiosity is perhaps the most underappreciated attribute of innovative culture. Are people raising questions in meetings? Are questions appreciated? For a complex challenge, is there collaboration to frame it with sufficient depth?
Creativity: This is the most visible aspect of innovative culture. Idea portals, idea walls, brainstorms, off-sites, if there is idea generation, it is generally visible.
Experimentation: In manufacturing and hardware-centric businesses, experimentation may be happening only in laboratories. In software, it could happen anywhere. It could also be visible in prototyping events such as hackathons. Appreciation of good experiments despite failures is an uncommon but crucial aspect of the maturity of the culture.
Demo & Review: Innovation review is, in my opinion, the defining characteristic of innovative culture. Who participates in the review? What kind of questions are asked? Are resources (people, budget) allocated? Do demos happen in the review or just slide show?

Some of these characteristics like creativity are visible on the walls as one walks around in the organization or perhaps on the walls of the intranet. Some others like reviews and experimentation happen in conference rooms and labs. For some of the SME business owners I interacted with last month, experimentation was the most challenging aspect as it involves investment in tools and expertise in designing and executing experiments. And I agree. However, I feel that a culture of continuous improvement is a good place to start the journey as it doesn’t involve major investment. Many times business leaders want to focus only on big bets.

It takes years to build a culture as evident in Toyota's idea management system dashboard. It took five years for the participation to cross ten percent and almost fifteen years for it to reach thirty percent. In contrast, destroying a culture doesn’t take that long. Imagine a CEO sending a curt message saying that failure will not be tolerated. It won’t be surprising if people stop experimenting due to fear of failure.

Appreciation is a tricky lever. If you decide to appreciate every idea, then appreciation loses its significance. And if you decide to appreciate only the successful innovations, then smart failures remain unappreciated. In a place where only success matters, people will avoid risk so as not to fail. One needs to find the right balance between efforts (giving ideas, doing experiments, making a business case) and outcomes.

I feel an innovation review is a powerful lever, especially for senior management. A lot can be communicated through the decisions and feedback given during a review. For example, a review that emphasizes a demo vs just a slideshow sends a message that prototyping matters.

Hope this characterization helps in deriving a basic assessment of the culture of innovation in small and big organizations and gives direction on possible plans of action.

My 3 takeaways from Agastya’s “Student, teacher, and AI” conference at Kuppam

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 05:46:00 +0000

Thanks to my friend Ajith Basu, I got an opportunity to participate in the “Student, teacher, and AI”, a national conference held at Agasty’s beautiful Kuppam campus. I was part of the facilitation team with Shriram Bharathan and Suhasini Seelin. The participants came from education departments in the central and several state government offices, schools, colleges, corporates, startups, and NGOs. The conference had 3 thrust areas: (1) demystifying AI, (2) the role of AI in future curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, and (3) AI's influence on social and emotional learning. Here are my 3 takeaways from my sketchy and selective notes.

Self-learning may be a myth: AI is going to enable self-learning by generating personalized insights. For example, AI can tell the teacher that specific four students are weak in – say “division by 7”. This perspective was championed by Anand Rangarajan of Google among others. Having experienced online self-learning and being a beneficiary of YouTube’s recommendation engine myself, I was drawn to this view. However, Prof Bindu Thirumalai of TISS was vocal in suggesting that self-learning is a myth. Learning is fundamentally a social phenomenon and peer group and mentoring play a crucial role. Having grown up in an educated family and having access to helping friends, could my understanding of self-learning be flawed? I am curious.

Empathy, not yet, but beware of biases today: We looked at a short fictional case where Preetha, a personal artificial assistant, acts as an empathic friend to an 8th-standard girl, Swati, who is struggling with math in the class. Experts felt that most of the technological elements needed for the dialogue are already present. However, the degree of empathy and warmth demonstrated in the story is still missing in the human-AI interaction.

We also explored biases exhibited by Swati and Preetha. While we were doing that Dr. Pradeep from Google fed the story to Bard and showed us how Bard can identify biases participants had not spotted yet. We also reflected upon our own biases we are carrying. During this exercise, most of us were using the term biases to mean prejudices and inclinations. Prof Arun Tangirala of IIT Madras championed a view that for something to be called a bias, we need to have a ground truth and evaluate whether there is a systematic error of judgment. While there were differences in the meaning of bias, there was a consensus that biases will be amplified in the AI world, and it demands greater awareness.

Will AI enable creative adaptive intelligence? Not clear. Ramji Raghavan of Agastya proposed that to live in a world where technology such as AI widens the complexity gap, we need creative adaptive intelligence. Will AI enable it? It is not obvious. Some participants felt that they were already turning to ChatGPT for every problem, and that meant they were becoming lazy. Prof C. K. Manjunath from SMVITM, Mangalore presented how an AI-enabled advertisement such as Titan Eye+ becomes interactive and fun and asked, “How can an average teacher match this creativity?” Ms Changra, the Education Minister from Dharamsala, felt that unless we are alert, technology overdependence may affect our mental well-being.

To me personally, the two high points of the conference had very limited AI in it. One was a play by kids from Ganganagar Government School in Bangalore directed by Suhasini, and the second one was a veena recital by Vidushi. Sujatha Thiagarajan. Both evoked strong emotions. Would an AI-enacted play or an AI-recital in the future have a similar effect? I don’t know.

image credit: Agastya International Foundation

3Cs of idea communication illustrated through Andrej Karpathy’s LLM talk

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 09:50:00 +0000

Communicating your idea effectively is important be it to customers, team members, or investors. We presented 3 attributes of idea communication – curiosity, concreteness, and credibility in our book “8 steps to innovation”. In this blog, I would like to illustrate the 3Cs using Andrej Karpathy’s talk “Intro to large language models” which he published on his YouTube channel.

Andrej Karpathy is one of my favorite teachers in the deep learning area. The OpenAI founding member and ex-director of AI at Tesla has a hands-on approach to teaching involving Python, Pytorch, and technical papers. Hence, I was surprised when Andrej uploaded a PowerPoint presentation on his YouTube channel. I was familiar with half the information in the talk. And yet, there was a lot I could learn from the way Andrej presented. It is an excellent example to illustrate how 3Cs – curiosity, concreteness, and credibility improve the effectiveness of a presentation. Let’s look at each C one by one.

Curiosity: A good presentation not only makes you curious early on, it keeps you engaged by maintaining a curiosity flow. What does curiosity flow in Andrej’s talk look like? He begins with the question, “What is an LLM?” (21 min), then he moves on to the second part, “The promise and future directions of LLM” (17 min), and in the third and last part, Andrej talks about “the challenges in LLM paradigm” (13 min).

Within each part, Andrej is maintaining a curiosity flow. For example, while explaining what an LLM is, Andrej asks questions like “How do we get the (neural network) parameters?” “What does a neural network do?” “How do we obtain an assistant?” etc. While presenting the future directions in LLM research, Andrej explains problems like – what is equivalent of system-2 thinking? Or how do we get tree search in chess to language? How do we create a self-improvement sandbox environment for LLM like how it happened for AlphaGo? And, in the final part, he shows how different jailbreaks like “prompt injection” “data exfiltration” or “data poisoning” pose a security challenge for an LLM. In short, it helps to build a curiosity flow while designing an idea presentation.

Concreteness: Large Language Models are high-dimensional and abstract and as Andrej alludes to in the talk, how they work is not fully clear. Hence, it makes sense to use lots of concrete examples to make the concept understandable. And that’s what Andrej does. In many places, he shows how LLMs respond in certain situations by showing how ChatGPT behaves when you prompt it in a particular way. For example, he illustrates the “reversal curse” by showing how ChatGPT answers the question “Who is Tom Cruise’s mother?” correctly while saying “I don’t know” when asked, “Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer’s son?” He gives a demo of how LLMs use tools like browser search, calculator, and Python libraries to solve a given problem and present the information as a plot.

Andrej also uses several metaphors or analogies to explain concepts. For example, he says an LLM is like a zip file of the Internet, except that it is a lossy compression. Or, LLM is not like a car where you can understand and explain how different parts work together to give its function. Or, current LLMs are like speed chess which uses an automatic and fast system-1 mode of thinking, and while it is yet to learn how to solve problems like competitive chess where players use deliberate, slow, system-2 mode of thinking involving tree search.

My biggest takeaway from the talk comes in the form of a metaphor when Andrej explains that it is better to think of an LLM as the kernel of an emerging operating system (like Windows or Linux) rather than as a chatbot or a bot generator. To explain this, he maps various components of current OSes to LLM components. For example, he says the Internet is like the hard disk in the traditional OS, and context window is like the working memory or RAM, etc. I thought it was a powerful metaphor to convey the paradigm shift.

Credibility: Most idea presenters like you and me need to worry about making our ideas credible. Given his position and brand and given the popularity of LLMs, Andrej probably doesn’t have to pay special attention to this aspect. However, he is making forward-looking statements in this talk, and he needs to ensure he doesn’t divulge any information confidential to OpenAI. He achieves this by citing academic papers while mentioning future directions and security challenges. His demo also adds to the credibility. He is not making any “AGI is around the corner” kind of hyperbolic statements and devotes time to talking about the limitations and challenges of the current LLMs.

I hope this illustration helps one to see how the 3Cs - curiosity flow, concreteness, and credibility help in designing better presentations.

Learning from innovation dashboards visible through annual reports

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 09:53:00 +0000

Innovation means different things to different sectors and these differences get reflected in how they present their innovation dashboards. For the past few years, several listed companies in India have started presenting their innovation dashboards either explicitly in the form of a table sometimes titled “intellectual capital” or implicitly through various parameters like new product launches, pilots, kaizens, new initiatives, automations, etc. How do these innovation dashboards look? Let’s look at 4 such dashboards as visible to us through their FY23 annual reports. These companies are Tata Motors, Asian Paints, SBI Life Insurance, and Zomato, and their sectors are automotive, building materials (paints, coatings, and home décor products), insurance, and online food ordering. Please note that the innovation dashboard that gets presented in annual reports is likely to be a subset of what is tracked internally. Disclaimer: Some of these companies are my clients, but here I am restricting myself to data available only through annual reports.

What can we learn and not learn from these dashboards?

Despite being from different sectors, all four companies had something to report on new products/programs launched in the financial year.

Intellectual property especially patents and designs are relevant to Tata Motors and Asian Paints but not to SBI Life and Zomato. Tata Motors in India may be learning the nuances of the game from JLR.

Digital transformation is an important focus area for SBI Life while for digitally native companies like Zomato, it is part of the DNA.

Automation is an important focus area for all four companies. For SBI Life, underwriting process automation provides a good opportunity for improvement.

Partners – insurance agents for SBI Life and delivery partners for Zomato play an important role in their business. Improving partner experience is happening through digital transformation for SBI Life while for digitally native Zomato providing offline experience through resting places with drinking water, washrooms, charging stations, WiFi, helpdesk, and first-aid is important.

R&D expenditure as a proxy for experimentation capacity is visible through Tata Motors and Asian Paints reports but not from SBI Life and Zomato. Tata Motors report mentions they have 11 technology hubs/R&D/engineering centres while the Asian Paints report mentions the strength of the R&D team. Zomato report mentions various pilots like Intercity Legends, Zomato everyday, and reusable packaging. These are experiments which may or may not become successful.

Continuous improvement must be important to all players. However, systematic efforts are visible through kaizen reporting in Tata Motors and Asian Paints but not in SBI Life and Zomato.

Automation through bots is visible in the SBI Life report. However, the efficiency of bot usage can come at the cost of customer experience. Currently, the quality of automated responses to customer support queries is poor in most cases. This trade-off is not visible.

Platform is an enabler of innovation and all four players leverage different types of platforms. Tata Motors has vehicular platforms, Asian Paints has chemical technology-related platforms, SBI Life has digital servicing platforms, and Zomato has an order management platform. However, platform-related metrics are not visible in these reports. We can infer that platforms would have played a role when Tata Motors launched 150 variants in a year.

Open innovation is an enabler of innovation. Asian Paints report mentions having a technology council with four external members with diverse expertise in various technology areas relevant to the business. Tata Motors must collaborate with other Tata and non-Tata companies, especially in the electric mobility space in creating the ecosystem. However, the related metric is not visible.

In short, there is a lot that can be gathered about innovation from the dashboards available in the annual reports. Innovation dashboard reporting is not a statutory requirement. And yet, it is a good source of input for students of innovation.

Journey mapping tips from Tony Fadell, the father of iPod

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:38:00 +0000

Journey mapping is one of my favorite tools to capture customer, employee, partner’s experience journey and identify gaps to enhance it further. Tony Fadell, the father of iPod, has given excellent tips on how he and his team at Nest used journey mapping for experience design in his book “Build: An unorthodox guide to making things worth making”. Here is an attempt to capture some of Fadell’s tips related to journey mapping.

“You should be able to map out and visualize exactly how a customer discovers, considers, installs, uses, fixes, and even returns your product. It all matters,” Fadell says in the book. When people come to him to show a new product they have built, he asks, “Tell me what’s so special about the customer journey”. If the customer journey is that important, why does it get ignored? Fadell points to the cognitive bias we tend to carry – “We’re wired to focus our attention on tangible things that we can see and touch to the point that we overlook the importance of intangible experiences and feelings.”

Before we look at 3 examples of how journey mapping was used for Nest, let’s look at a journey map template Fadell gives along with possible touchpoints in each stage:

Fadell’s point is that we tend to focus on the “product design” stage at the cost of the other stages. Here are three examples from the Nest learning thermostat design.

The app: In the early days of Nest, everyone was focused on perfecting the thermostat. It involved getting the design, AI, electronics, mechanics, colors, textures, right. The installation, feeling of turning the dial, the glow when you walk past, all this was thought through. Fadell points out that in Nest journey, 10% was website-ads-packaging-in-store display, 10% was installation, 10% was looking-and-touching the device and 70% was monitoring and control on phone-laptop. After the thermostat was installed and working, majority of touchpoints were through the app. And the team had lost track of the app. They had done initial prototypes when the project began but thought it to be the easy stuff they can come back to later. And it got pushed to the end. Fadell admits he became “really loud” to bring team’s attention to the app.

The box: “You should be prototyping your marketing long before you have anything to market,” says Fadell. And that is what they did at Nest. The cardboard box, its packaging, the product name, the tagline, the top features, their priority order – all these were printed on a cardboard box and constantly tweaked and revised. Two personas were created one tech-savvy husband and his wife, the decision maker, dictated what made into the house and what got returned. Nest team was asking questions like, “Why would they pick up the box? What would they want to know? What was most important to them?” There was no thermostat isle in Best Buy, Nest’s first retail partner. Thermostats were not bought by homeowners directly. Best Buy was not going to create a thermostat isle either. So, they collaborated with Best Buy and invented a Connected-Home isle.

The screw-driver: When prototypes of the actual thermostat were ready, they were sent out to people to test. Self-installation was potentially a major anxiety generator. Hence, it was a crucial test. Testers reported that the installation was smooth. Everything is up and running. But it took about an hour to install. That was way more than what the team thought. So they started digging into the installation experience and see where things are taking time. It turned out that the installation itself was not the culprit. The testers spent twenty minutes locating the right tools like the screwdriver. So Nest team decided to include a little screwdriver in the installation kit. And, to their surprise, the screwdriver served the purpose of a marketing tool because people had to use it more often than the actual thermostat.

In short, the app, the box, and the screwdriver are excellent examples of how journey mapping can be used to enhance the intangible touchpoints in a customer’s journey.

Related articles:

Journey mapping illustrated through Dunzo’s order-tracking experience

Image sources:

Nest screwdriver image source: https://bmak.substack.com/p/nest-screwdriver

Nest app and thermostat image source: youtube.com

8-steps after 10-years: Why bother building participation?

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 08:47:00 +0000

It has been 10 years since the publication of our book “8-steps to innovation”. During this time, we got the opportunity to share the framework with various leaders. We also saw the framework being put into practice. Through this series of reflections, I will try to shine a light on situations where the framework might be weak. In this article, I will question the third step – building participation.

The 8-step framework suggests that if you want to build an idea pipeline, create a challenge book first (step 2) and then involve people in participative problem-solving (step 3). For example, if you have a brainstorming session around a specific challenge, you end up generating several ideas. Here are situations where this may not work.

Inventor’s challenge: I have met several inventors who prefer to keep their ideas to themselves. They have no interest in sharing it with their boss or colleagues because they feel they may steal their ideas. Perhaps they have had a bad experience in the past where others took credit for their idea. In my workshops, when we have brainstorms, these people suggest some ideas. And then meet me during the break or send a message to share their pet idea which they are not comfortable sharing with others. I understand the importance of secrecy until you have some form of protection. However, sometimes people end up carrying ideas with them for years without any form of validation. It helps to have a few sounding boards. Is ChatGPT a good brainstorming partner? Perhaps.

Manager’s fear: A few years ago, I wrote about 3 reasons why managers don’t throw their toughest challenge to their teams. The single biggest reason is fear of perceived incompetence. They feel they get paid to solve problems and if they share their challenge with the team, they might be perceived as incompetent. It gives confidence when you solve a problem and get your team to implement your solution. This works best when you have been in the system for a long time and know the domain very well. However, when you start managing an existing team, you may not be the domain expert. And this approach may not work.

Why care about small ideas? Continuous improvement as a systematic approach has been around for over a hundred years. Our book presents stories from Toyota, Titan, and TVS. Many organizations continue to highlight the number of ideas and the number of employees participating in continuous improvement programs in their annual reports. For example, the Asian Paints FY23 annual report says that there were 7000+ improvement suggestions submitted. Having said that I have met several leaders who don’t consider continuous improvement worth the cost. What matters to them are big bets. As a result, participation becomes unimportant. Participation thrives when small ideas are encouraged.

Participation in virtual teams: Virtual teams have been around for a while but their presence increased during and post-Covid era. As people started working from home, formal brainstorms and tea-coffee chats diminished. As video calls started taking time, initiatives focusing on not-so-urgent issues took a backseat. And participation in innovation-related initiatives went down. Getting people to participate in anything other than deliveries became a challenge at least in some organizations.

In short, participation may be one way of building an idea pipeline. However, there are situations in which participation may not work or one may be uncomfortable sharing the ideas. Perhaps ChatGPT is your partner. Problems may be defined and solved by individuals and implemented through teams if they are the managers. So yeah, skip step 3 if you don’t need it.

Strategic management of technology and innovation 2023: A reflection

noreply@blogger.com (Vinay Dabholkar) — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 09:37:00 +0000

Last June to August I got an opportunity to teach the course “Strategic management of technology and innovation” again at IIM Bangalore. I have been teaching this elective for the last five years. The class is a mix of part-time MBA (PGPEM) and full-time MBA (PGP) students. Every time I learn a lot through the process of preparation and class interaction. In this article, I present three things that stand out in my reflection and two questions where my gut feeling was significantly different from the class.

Starting a business, Dunzo, and the art of iteration: During the first half of the course, we explored the question, “How do I build innovation stamina systematically?” One of the frameworks we used was 2-loops of innovation – the idea-to-demo loop validated feasibility and desirability assumptions while the demo-to-cash loop validated scalability and profitability assumptions. We used the 2-loops lens to look at the starting of various businesses like Kodak, Dunzo, Ather Energy, Husk Power Systems, etc. For each iteration, we analyzed four parameters - speed, cost, quality of feedback, and cognitive biases, especially confirmation bias.

Dunzo turned out to be interesting on multiple fronts. It was more relatable as compared to Kodak (hardly anyone had used Kodak camera) and Husk Power (little experience with off-grid villages). For the first six months, until it grew to a few thousand customers, Dunzo was running on WhatsApp. Later it adopted mobile apps, cloud, and analytics. Dunzo also experimented with drone delivery. It was a good example of how a business can start low-tech and iteratively become more high-tech. Founders spoke the language of hypothesis testing and customer focus. Customer and delivery partner experience was also improved over the years. And yet, Dunzo remained in the news for cash crunch and market share erosion throughout the course duration. When asked, which is easier to fix – a broken customer experience or a broken business model? Almost the entire class felt a broken business model was easier to fix. However, we found it easier to find counter-examples for the latter – Dunzo, WeWork, Micromax, and Kingfisher – all had decent customer experience but struggled to fix their business model. In case you have any examples where a broken customer experience couldn’t be fixed, happy to learn from you.

Titan, smartwatches, and the surfing of technology waves: In the second half of the course, we shifted focus to enabling and management of innovation. We restricted ourselves to listed companies and used only secondary sources for discussion such as annual reports, CXO interviews, and quarterly earnings call transcripts.

Surfing a technology wave is not easy, too early and you might create technology debt, too late and you risk losing to the competition. We explored how various companies responded to technology waves – IBM-Internet, Titan-smartwatches, Vimeo-video marketing, Amara Raja Batteries-Li-Ion, Lego-sustainability, Amazon-speech recognition, and AMD-data centers. For example, we asked, “Was Titan late in responding to the smartwatch wave?” This was interesting because 75% of the class wore smartwatches and none had a Titan. So, on the face of it, the answer was obvious. However, as we dug into the reports, we found the answer to be much more nuanced and the game is far from over. We used the "real-win-worth it" framework to guess investment, no-investment, and divestment decisions. For example, we asked, “Was it real, win, or worth it criteria that may have led to Ford Motors divesting in Level-5 autonomous car startup, Argo AI?”

AI, creativity, and artificial insight: When the course began in June, ChatGPT hangover was still lingering. I didn’t change the nature of assignments or projects. However, referencing norms became stricter. The fact that AI is going to be a powerful force going forward was given. The challenge for me was to show how to see through the fog and hype. This is where guest lectures helped. Ravi Aranke showed how to use ecosystem tracking – users (individual and paid), startup investments, enterprise adoption, regulatory bodies, expert conversions (experts shifting their opinions), and professionals (marketing, lawyers, doctors, CAs, recruiters) to create one’s view. Sunil Mishra showed how one can build a local chatbot using Python’s langchain library and highlighted generative AI’s banking uses-cases.

We looked at the surprising move 37 during AlphaGo vs Lee See dol 2016 Go game and asked, “Was move 37 creative?” It was one of the moves which the professional Go players thought as a mistake at the first sight and then realized it was part of an intentional strategy. Almost the entire class felt that the move 37 was not creative. Personally, I felt the move was creative, but it also created an opportunity to learn about what creativity means to different people. I also tried to give a glimpse of how Karl Friston shows curiosity and insight can be simulated by synthetic agents using active inference framework. Of course, active inference is primarily used to explain natural intelligence but he and other researchers have also put forward a proposal for how it may lead to distributed super-intelligence.

A potentially game-changing emerging technology which I thought I could spend some time on was genetic engineering - CRISPR, prime editing, etc. Unfortunately, I fell short on my preparation as well as the availability of time. However, I managed to use fiction for the first time as a source of use cases. We looked at a short case prepared from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “Klara and the Sun” to classify use cases into current, near-future, distant future / impossible buckets. Ishiguro’s novel unfolds on the backdrop of AI, robotics, and genetic engineering.