This book is really three books in one.

Firstly, it is an inside account of the breaking of the Satyam scandal, when the founder and chairman of one of India’s most successful and most loved companies confessed to having committed a massive accounting fraud. Told through the personal statements of employees and managers, we discover the human impact on devoted employees when the company that has become part of their own identity changes from revered to disgraced overnight.

Secondly, the book provides a step-by-step guide to managing a company in the immediate aftermath of a crisis. Starting from a ‘lights on strategy’, the book moves into detailed processes for communication priorities, reestablishing trust in leaders, evaluating the cultural shifts and steering the culture back in the right direction.

In many ways, the actual cause of a corporate crisis (in this case, the accounting fraud) is not what does the long-term damage to the company. Much of the damage is caused by the subsequent loss of talent and knowledge which causes a flow-on loss of customers and revenue.

Many successful organisations have faced setbacks, and recovered, becoming stronger and healthier. As is explained in this book, (and in some ways referenced in Jim Collins’ writing) even in a crisis the application of great management and learning can retain talent and knowledge and help to set the company on a new, more sustainable course.

Finally, the book is a manifesto for the importance of learning and development in all companies. If these powerful learning strategies can guide and heal a sick organization, imagine what they can do for a healthy one.

I would recommend this big not only for managers in learning and development roles, but also for managers of other departments. The techniques in this book don’t need to be saved for that one huge crisis. Many of these strategies can be implemented in ongoing planning, in preparing an organization for change, or even in helping employees deal with the small knocks that all companies face: the death of an employee or leader, the loss of a major client or changes in the political/economic/technical landscape that challenge the established vision for the company.

Over the last few years I’ve watched as bloggers (notably Chris Brogan) have pushed the new-year technique of selecting three words that will drive you for the year to come, rather than making resolutions.

Resolutions tend to be limiting and a bit rushed in the making, which is why they have such a reputation for fast failure. Conversely, Three Words are about the direction in which you want to grow and success can be measured in many ways.

The concept of three words also resonates closely with a concept that we teach our film students, which is Theme. Great films have a unifying theme that ties together every camera shot, character, location, dialogue and plot direction.

A way to describe it more succinctly is “theme is what the movie is really about”.

• What is Godfather really about? “Power Corrupts”.
• What is Chinatown really about? “Power wins over justice because it is more ruthless and aggressive”.
• What is Jurassic Park really about? “Man cannot control nature”.

I see the concept of Three Words as a theme for the year. Each day and month, and in each action or project that I undertake, I can ask myself, “is what I am planning to do ‘on theme’?” Rather than fixed new year resolutions that can only be either done or not done, these words are designed to move my life in a particular direction in 2012.

So what are my three words for 2012?

Focus. Create. Measure.

Focus.

I’m going to stop trying to do a thousand things at the same time. I’m going to block my calendar throughout the day into chunks and focus on one thing at a time.

I’m going to try to stop jumping ahead into the newer, more exciting projects until I have wrapped up what I am already working on.

I’m going to keep asking myself, “Is this idea/project/activity important, or just fun/easy”.

Create.

2012 will be a year to make things. It is easy to come up with thousands of ideas for how to make my life/work bigger, better, greater. The challenge is making these ideas real. 2012 will be about taking ideas off the drawing board and ‘shipping’ real products.

Measure.

In the standard business learning-loop (plan, do, measure, improve) measurement has always been my weakest area. By measurement, I mean building careful records over time that can be used and shared by other people.

2012 will be a year of making my intrinsic knowledge extrinsic so that I can teach other people what I know. I will stop doing the measure-improve cycle in my head. My ultimate goal for this ‘word’ for the year will be to build a formal marketing model for our school, so our testing and measurement can become focused on refining the model, rather than trying to understand ‘marketing’ in general.

If you want more information on the whole Three Words thing, check out http://www.chrisbrogan.com/3words2012/

Best of luck for your own 2012!

Some of the new challenges would be training and managing remote employees, maintaining equality of workplace experience for staff in differently-sized and equipped offices, accurate hiring and capacity forecasting, and identifying talent internally.

If I have learnt one thing about managing people, it is this:  happy, motivated, engaged employees will solve your problems for you.

They will come up with more solutions, and more creative solutions that you can. They will put in the time and effort required for the solutions to work. They will stand by you in the fight to make the company better.

With this in mind, I began a research project: what are the best employers in the world doing to keep their employees happy and engaged?

I also wanted to ensure that these practices would be transferable from big international companies, to a Indian start-up. For this, I delved into the science of happiness. What ‘really’ makes people happy, at a human level? Getting a promotion makes you happy, but why?

By mapping HR best practices against a scientific model of happiness, I isolated six ‘tools’ that can be used in any workplace to nurture a happy workforce.

Everything that I have learnt on this topic, I have compiled into an e-book, which I am providing as a free download.

Read it, learn from it, implement it. Make your company a happier place.

Right click the image and choose ‘save as’ to download:

Happy-Workplaces-Engaged-Employees-2011-Chris-Higgins

Ajami (2009)

Co-Written and Co-Directed by Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani

Ajami is a gripping peek into the intersecting lives of an assortment of young Muslims, Christians, and Jews living in a suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel. The area is poor, with high unemployment and the resultant high crime.

A Bedouin gangster walks into a restaurant to demand protection money and the owner shoots him in defense. The gangster’s clan vow to wipe out the owner’s family in revenge. The family turn to a local Christian community leader who negotiates for a tribal court to resolve the issue of blood money payments. The community leader also has a restaurant. One of his staff is an Arab boy living illegally in Israel while making money for his mother’s operation. The restaurant cook, also a Muslim, is dating a Jewish girl, much to the chagrin of his friends. An Israeli policeman tries to hold his family together after his soldier brother disappears. These stories (and more) jump back and forth in place, viewpoint, and time.

Like any film formed from intersecting stories, Crash jumps to mind, and there are certainly parallels. The biggest difference is in the production style. Films such as Crash are heavily scripted, with carefully composed shots. In order to differentiate the many characters, the characterization can border on caricaturish.

Ajami avoids this with two techniques.

Firstly, the film is shot hand-held, documentary-style. The motion is fast and fluid. The blocking is clumsy. When the actors run, the camera runs. Music spills from stereos and TV sets. The feeling is of being right there with them.

Secondly, the actors are mostly non-professional. They are normal people that speak and move naturally. Dramatic monologues would be absurd coming from their mouths, so the script gives them real, conversational dialogues, filled with grunts, repetition, interruptions and unfinished sentences.

What really brought the film to life for me was the use of language. The Muslim characters speak Arabic, the Christians and Jews speak Hebrew. When they are together they speak a mixture. Here in India, I have sat through countless conversations wherein some people speak Hindi, some speak English, and some speak both. The conversations meander between the languages. Someone tells a joke in Hindi, which has to be translated for the English speakers. Someone uses a fancy English word which has to be translated for others. When making an emphatic point, someone will repeat their line in both languages. Ajami captured this perfectly. It is an awkward way to write dialogue, but it is exactly how these people communicate in real life.

Each character is shown from multiple perspectives. A person can be both kind and cruel. Tolerant and bigoted. Thoughtful and thoughtless. Each one of them wants something better, and not just for themselves, many want to help their families.

But these young people are trapped by the weight of centuries of tradition and hatred. Where, when and how they can travel and work, who they can be friends with, who they can marry, how they resolve disputes. All this, and more, is predetermined for them, leaving them powerless, angry and hostile. When trying to arrest a drug dealer who is breaking his house arrest, the police are overpowered by a mob of civilians to come to the dealer’s help. The policeman angrily ponders this, “he sells drugs to their children, but they help him escape”. The local Arabs hate the police more than they hate a criminal.

These are the moments that make Ajami so powerful. The plot is carefully assembled, filled with truly surprising twists. The characters slowly blossom throughout the film. At the end we sympathize with each of them, no matter what they have done. But it is that aching discontent and simmering hatred that fills every scene with a truly memorable sadness. This is what keeps coming back into my mind: the ‘feeling’ of the film, rather than just the story.

Do you hate cramming all of your errands into the weekend?
Do you resent having to beg permission to watch your kid’s weekday soccer game?
Are you tired of seeing people who aren’t very good at their jobs get promoted because they arrive early and stay late?

There’s got to be a better way—and there is, according to Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. They should know – they developed the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) and rolled it out at Best Buy headquarters. These days, they consult to other companies on how to create similar systems.

Some of the key elements of a ROWE are:

• You can work when you want, where you want, as long as the work gets done.
• All meetings are optional.

To make this approach successful, managers have to be specific with their employees regarding their deliverables, and employees have to learn to manage their own time. Letting everything happen at the last minute (constant fire-fighting), because you know that all employees should be at their desks anyway, no longer works.

Employees are only assessed on the actual work they complete. Not, the number of hours that they spend in the office or how many meetings they attend.

Many managers, upon hearing this, imagine total chaos. Everyone on permanent holiday, the company failing as nothing gets done. According to the authors however, work doesn’t really change that much. Everything gets done. People who have to work face to face still do. People turn up to meetings that are well run and relevant. The big difference that that employees are vastly happier because they can balance work with the rest of their lives.

This book is a great discussion of the first part of the title: why work sucks. Any reader who is trapped in an office that lives (unnecessarily) by the clock, will love discovering something that articulates so clearly how they feel. It really gets you thinking about the nature of work i.e. something you do vs somewhere you go.

Sadly the book fails miserably in resolving the second part of the title: and how to fix it. There is almost zero detail on the mechanics of transforming your office to this system. There is little discussion about how the system would translate for workplaces that aren’t composed of ‘individual contributors’, such as retail, customer service, education, medical, construction etc.

A more cynical reader might assume that this book is just a sales pitch for their consulting services…….

The authors suggest that this should be an-all-or-nothing approach. I, on the other hand, suggest you use this book as a launching pad to question the nature of work and how you structure your office. Can you manage your employees just on the basis of their work? Is time-at-work important for you? Which of your employees’ actions actually contribute to the company’s success? Can you just manage based on these actions and ignore everything else?

Good Luck!!!

Direct Links to online book stores:

www.flipkart.com (Only for users in India)

www.bookdepository.co.uk (free delivery to most countries)

www.amazon.com (Best for US purchases)

(please note these are affiliate links)

Hindi Television Trends of 2010

Yash Raj and Sony tried, and failed, to bring in the future of Hindi television

For me, this was one of the most significant media events of the year. Over the last 5 years I have listened to thousands of people complain about Hindi television, and ask why shows similar to the better western content can’t be made in India. Finally someone tried to do just this, and, despite a huge marketing campaign, it didn’t work.

Maybe the marketing didn’t connect with viewers? Maybe the programming (keeping the timeslots to late nights or weekends) failed, and the shows should have gone head to head with the GEC primetime offerings? Maybe anyone who is interested in high production values and good scripts is already watching English channels. Maybe these shows were just way ahead of their time, and this is exactly what people will be watching 5 years from now?

For now at least, we are stuck with family serials and dancing reality TV

Music videos to promote TV shows

StarPlus and Colours created music videos to promote their shows Masterchef, and Bigg Boss. While such videos can be played on TV, they are most useful as a viral internet marketing tool. Nice to see TV channels looking at new ways to promote their content.

Reality shows kept branching out

StarPlus had Masterchef and Mahayatra – a religious travel show.

Imagine had Desi Girl, Rahul Dulhaniya Le Jayega, Raaz Pichhle Janam Ka.

Bindass had Emotional Atyachar

Sadly, the endless dance and singing shows still seem to rule, with compulsory celebrity hosts, no matter how pointless their presence.

StarPlus took back the number one GEC slot from Colors.

The competitive lead from Colors’ ‘disruptive programming’ approach faded away as the other channels raced to dump their K serials and launch stories set in regional districts or with unusual protagonists.

Bad luck for Colors, but great news for India. Hindi television is in a far better place today than it was two years ago. The old formula for hit TV is gone, and story and character are more important than ever.

Multi-lingual viewers are starting to transition from the Hindi GECs to regional content

Channels in regional languages are blossoming, especially Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, and the four southern languages. The quality of content is improving, which is drawing more advertising money. Ernst and Young estimates that ad spends on regional channels will grow by 25% this year, compared to 16% on Hindi channels.

Broadcasters are taking the view that if they are going to bleed viewers and revenue from their flagship channel, they might as well bleed into other channels that they own. Almost all the big Hindi TV players have either already started launching regional channels or have announced that they will be doing so in the near future.

More regional channels mean more competition to develop great content. This will accelerate the slippage of viewers and ad revenue further.

One potential upside of this that I can see is that as more melodramatic, emotional content shifts to regional channels, the Hindi GECs will start exploring newer formats and narratives.

As a side note – another reason that channels like regional offerings is that the content is cheap. Hindi drama costs 7-10 lakh per episode (on average) compared to 2 Lakh an episode more regional dramas. Reality shows are also cheaper as the local stars charge far less to host the content.

Prime time expanded

From channel to channel, primetime can now cover anything between 6:30pm and 11:30pm.

What does this mean? More people are watching TV, over a wider spread of time. Primetime is all original programming, not repeats, so more primetime means a wider range of content for viewers to choose from.

First web based show – Bol Niti Bol from Balaji

Balaji showed just how flexible its business model is by backflipping from a range of virtually identical K serials, to a variety of significantly different shows. On top of that they have released a couple of great films (including the awesome LSD), started an online community to search for talent, and have launched a film and acting school.

To top it off, in July they released India’s first web based serial. Bol Niti Bol, the life journal of an 18 year old girl making her way through life.

Bol Niti Bol was actually designed as a multi-site web experience. Videos are hosted on YouTube and news/lifestyle sites, plus a Facebook page and a twitter feed. Balaji claims that the 17 episodes received more than 650,000 views in the first month, and they had 10,000 followers across the social media sites.

Why is this important? When families earn more money in developed countries, they buy more TVs. In the US, more than 50% of households have 3 or more televisions. Everyone in the household gets to watch whatever they want, so there is space for a huge variety of channels and content.

In contrast, most Indian families don’t own a TV. Often TVs are shared between families, or within a large extended family. As Indian families become richer, they rarely buy more TVs. This is why the target audience for popular TV channels is SEC BCD women, even though we keep hearing about India’s enormous ‘youth’ population.

Indian families buy computers (for their children’s education), and fancy mobile phones. As the older family members usually control the TV set, there is a huge opportunity to deliver targeted content to the younger family members over the internet.

With 3G just around the corner, and smart phones with big colour screens selling for under Rs.5000, we will shortly see a deluge of short-form web-based content aimed at the 15-25yr old market.

Hindi Film Trends of 2010

For Serious Films, Story Ruled.

Big budget serious films that lacked story, or lacked Indian context struggled at the boxoffice, often flopping. Kites, Ravaan, Veer, Teen Patti, Aisha and Guzaarish for example. Despite beautiful production values, each of these were either poorly written or lacked a connection with Indian life and values.

Big budget serious films with good stories or strong Indian context did well (as long as they were properly marketed). Rajneeti, My Name is Khan, Once Upon A Time In Mumbai.

Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Se was possibly the worst marketed film of the year. Someone stuck up a few posters, and the next day it was in cinemas. Although, since Lamhaa and Red Alert also struggled at the box office, despite strong marketing, maybe people just don’t like films about conflict zones this year?

Big-budget, madcap, plotless comedies continued to make as much money as ever. There were some unexplainable flops, but overall this category did well despite atrocious reviews with films such as Golmaal 3, Housefull, and Tees Maar Khan.

Small-Town Stories

Mirroring the trend in TV, stories set in smaller towns were generally successful. Dabaang, Tees Maar Khan, Peepli [Live], Udaan, Aakrosh, Ishqiya, Phas Gaye Re Obama, even featuring small-town attitudes or innocence (Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge, Tere Bin Laden)helped.

Other than in the big-budget comedies, there seemed to be far fewer international locations than in previous years. Possibly this is a hangover from the cash crunch that saw lots of producers slashing their film budgets.

‘Multiplex’ Films

The young, ‘non hero’, multiplex-driven genre continued to grow, generally through the efforts of Ranbir, Imran and Farhaan. I Hate Luv Storys, Karthik Calling Karthik, Anaaja Anjaani, Break Ke Baad.

Lots of 3D films

Indian multiplexes (at least in major cities) have rushed to upgrade their projection technology. Many Hollywood films, which in the US are shown in both 2 and 3D, in India were shown only in 3D

Lots of ‘New’

Lots of debuts. By some estimates there were over 150 new entrants to the industry in either significant acting roles or as writers or directors.

There were some great attempts at doing something different content-wise:

• First film with gay protagonists – Dunno Y… Na Jaane Kyon
• First TV show adaptation – Khichdi – The Movie
• And my favourite risk-taking film of 2010 – Love, Sex and Dhoka

Enter http://tastebuds.fm/

This is a dating/matchmaking site based on music. Users enter their favourite bands or artists and the site will find you matches in your area. As a cool bonus, if you are a Last.fm user (the online streaming music site) you can import all your musical tastes directly.

This is a great, and very simple idea!

The site is just getting off the ground (currently, from India, there are 16 men and 1 woman who have registered).

According to Mashable, the online dating industry is worth over $1 billion per year and is bigger then porn. India, with around 15 million users, is the 3rd biggest market for this service, after China and the US. In western countries these services try to match people on the basis of personality, discovered through lengthy (400 question??) forms. In India, the main filter is community/caste (leaving out the regular stuff such as geographical region).

I suspect that in India, for the coming generations, caste/community will decrease in importance, if not for marriage then certainly for dating. Sites like Tastebuds which offer a different method of matchmaking will become very helpful!!

What else could you use? film/TV tastes? literary taste? food preferences?

Outside of matchmaking, how can you use music to create bonds within your community or workplace? At Zappos (the online shoe retailer) when an employee logs into their computer they are shown a photo of another employee and asked to rate how well they know the person. Imagine if it also showed their musical preferences? Over time you could build networks within the company based on these tastes….

Just a thought

Obviously concept isn’t everything. The hotel has to be good at the basics. A great mattress and bedding. A soft fluffy towel. A good desk with enough power points. Good food. Quick service etc. But after that, you can layer on a concept to make the hotel unique.

India is years behind developed countries when it comes to hotels. Until a few years ago, the only choice was between great (lovely 5 star hotels) and crappy (old, run-down, usually overpriced).

A new generation of hotels is popping up. The 3 trends are:

• Cheap ‘business’ hotels. The leading chain in this is the Ginger group. Rs.1000-3000 per night for a basic, but new/clean room with a proper mattress, 24hr hot water, self service pretty much everything, small gym, Wi-Fi etc. It’s a great vision for how to run a hotel – strip out all the non-essentials, make whatever is left work really well. These hotels are aimed at domestic business travellers.
• Cheaper luxury brand hotels. This are things like Marriott ‘Courtyard’ hotels. They just leave off some of the higher end luxury features, and drop the room rates by about 20-40%
• Boutique hotels. These are small, luxury, stand-alone hotels, usually opened by someone who has always wanted to run a hotel (or has a great building and doesn’t know what else to do with it these might have 4-12 rooms and offer personalised service. Often the owner lives on-site.

This first category is the one with the most potential. Ginger is building some pretty big hotels, but some of them are getting 100% occupancy, booked over a week in advance. To be clear, 100% occupancy is not the best thing for a hotel. It means the rooms have no natural down-time for maintenance, so the management has to refuse revenue in order to work on the rooms. That’s turning down short-term profit for long-term value, a trait for which Indian businesses are not famous.

It also means that demand outweighs supply. More people can build similar hotels, and there are enough guests for everyone.

The one thing that I don’t like about these hotels, is that they are bland. There is nothing distinctive or memorable. In these cases that is what they are aiming for, but once the basics are in place, there is plenty of scope for concept to be layered on top.

A great example of a concept hotel is the new Nhow Hotel, in Berlin, Germany.

The theme is music, here’s how they have created it:

• All rooms with IPod connections and vast entertainment options
• Guitar hire through room service
• Top DJs playing in the bar
• Live music in the hotel’s open spaces
• 2 professional music studios,
• Hotel staff include a full-time music manager, and many ex-students of local music colleges
• Filling out the ‘Lifestyle” offerings are clothing sales from local designers, a headphone and streetwear store, and an art space.
• The architecture and interior design are both striking and were created by star designers.

This is the sort of place that you could stay in, and would still be telling people about a decade later!

Other than the recording studios, guitar hire, and musical staff, most of this stuff is not uncommon at good hotels around the world. What these guys have done differently is grouped everything together into a THEME. Creating a narrative that weaves around their offerings helps to market the property and help to guide future business decisions regarding services and expansions.

“Guillermo del Toro Opening a Boutique ‘Transmedia’ Studio

Transmedia storytelling, according to Wikipedia is “a technique of telling stories across multiple platforms and formats”. From a media and content perspective this can include film, television, online, print, radio etc.

Examples include:

• the TV series Heroes. It is based on television, but on top of that is a bunch of other stuff such as comics, website and books that cover the same characters and are set in the same universe. Same again for Lost.
• Almost anything Disney has done lately
• Isa TKM. This Venezuelan TV serial is about a schoolgirl in love with a musician. the show launched with websites, Facebook and MySpace pages, phone ringtones and downloads, and a music album,

The magic of great transmedia is that a casual fan can enjoy the basic offering (such as the TV show) while a more passionate fan can ‘drill-down’ into the universe and satisfy their desire for more detail.

In the past, these sort of expansions happened organically. A show was successful, so producers started looking for spin-off options. A more modern view, is to plan for these expansions right from the start.

This is the role of Transmedia agencies. They are not necessarily experts at any one media channel, but rather try to coordinate between the different channels, knowing what bits of the story will work best on different platforms.

Personally, I love this stuff and have been reading about it for a while. I don’t write about it much, primarily because it is still a heavily ‘academic’ subject which means that the people who do write about it sound much smarter than me

The reason the article caught my eye was the involvement of Guillermo del Toro the writer, producer, or director of many great films, including Pan’s Labyrinth, Blade 2, and Hellboy.  The company he has partnered in, Mirada, “will house all of the tools that filmmakers need to create entertainment that lives partly on the Web, partly in movie theaters, partly in video games under one roof.”

Awesome!

An important note: being from Torrentfreak, this data is entirely based on viewers who are computer literate, and have reasonably fast internet connections. Obviously this excludes most of India, and most other developing countries where film piracy is based around hard copies of DVDs or VCDs

First, the number of downloads

Not much growth, I would have expected more. Possible explanations are:

• Success in anti-piracy activities (and greater access to legal online sources) in the developed world are offsetting the growth in developing countries
• A more fragmented market – a wider range of films and TV content is available for download

Next, we look at the top ten films for the last two years. I have listed the number of downloads, the worldwide box office gross, the percentage of that revenue coming from US ticket sales. Finally, I have listed the worldwide box office revenue divided by download numbers

The film that really jumps out is RocknRolla. I loved the film, but it had a very limited release (and never released here in India, to my memory). The film was heavily pirated, making less than $2.75 worldwide for each person who downloaded it.

What does this tell us?

• The release was botched, and there was far greater demand than was catered for?
• The film was more popular in countries that are more prone to download (the film also had the lowest % of US revenues on this list)?
• The target audience was so small that they all saw the film, and then downloaded it as well?

I don’t know

Somewhat predictably, the genres of these films are mostly stacked in favour of the younger guys that are most likely to download films.

Possibly the film most effected by piracy was Kick-Ass. This film had HUGE buzz coming out of ComicCon and then flopped at the box office. An argument at the time was that the link between ‘geek buzz’ and sales was broken. In reality, the film’s target audience was also the people who are most likely to download films.

Roughly half of these films were in the top 10 box office grossing films of the year as well, on worldwide sales.

So which films did well at the box office, but weren’t pirated as heavily?

Pretty clear trends there. Animation films are fairly ‘safe’. The first twilight was pirated, but once everyone figured out that the films are for teenage girls, the downloadable factor wore off. Not sure why Angels & Demons and 2012 didn’t work out online. They were both bad films, but that doesn’t necessarily matter