AN MBA DIARY

What is Kubler-Ross Change Curve?

2019-05-02T14:58:00.000+05:30

Managing change and navigating through it is a challenging task for both managers and leaders. A recent training organized in the company on change management focussed on a framework - ADKAR model of change management. Before looking into ADKAR framework, let's first discuss about Kubler-Ross Change Curve.

What is Kubler-Ross Change Curve?

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was a Psychiatrist by profession who is well known for her work on treatment of dying patients from a psychological perspective.. She outlined the five stages that terminally ill patients experience in her book On Death and Dying. This five stages of grief model widely got accepted outside medical field and became part of most of of the changement management literature; most importantly as a tool to educate on the importance of how to adapt during changes.

The Five Stages of Grief aka Kubler-Ross Change Curve

Often the announcement of any change, especially that affects one's day-to-day routine is received with a shock followed by denial. A denial is considered to give us time to absorb the intensity of the news and keep ourselves away from accepting a change is coming. This is the first stage in the Kubler-Ross Change Curve -- Denial.

This is often followed by self-inflicting questions like why is it happening to only me raised concerns and anger in oneself. Slowly we accept the fact that a change is coming towards us which we were not expecting originally. This usually result in anger; angry towards ourselves resulting in self-blame, or anger towards other putting blame on others. This is the second stage in the curve -- Anger.

The third stage in Kubler-Ross Change Curve -- Bargain once we start to think of alternatives or falsely pretend if the change slows down. For example, pray to God; put more efforts into work to prove our self etc.

This may finally result in the next negative affect of being in Depression. This is the fourth stage in the five stages of grief. At this stage, we start to loose hope; tend to accept things as is. Often this results in demotivation and churn.

The last stage in the curve is Acceptance where we slowly start to accept things and looks for opportunities to prove, improve based on the new reality. This is when one tend to accept the new regulations, policies or projects and move on to what they are equipped with. It is not still in a happy space; but acts as a pivot point to move on.

For a manager, the key thing to understand from this curve is that, the stages of grief are not linear and an associate may move between stages. Also it is key to understand that the acceptance phase is just another beginning and we need to work on to make the associate navigate through it to a new normal that the organization wants to be in.

While this model looks simple, it is often a wonderful framework to associate with the emotions one may be going through post a change - be it professional or personal. Being able to understand the same helps in coping up faster with the change.

In a following blog post, we will look into ADKAR model.

Creating WOW-making Services Businesses

2018-11-12T16:59:00.002+05:30

Often we see debates on whether Product Marketing and Services Marketing is same of entirely different. While they share many thoughts, I believe services marketing is essentially heavily dependent on how the services is managed -- how you manage your services is how you market or build the brand for your service.

The Gap Model

This is perhaps THE framework when it comes to services management. Proposed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry in 1980's, this model continues to derive its relevance even today. The beauty of this framework is that it opens our eyes of how various organizational functions play their role. For example, the gap between expected services and perceived services (customer gap) is all about how we manage the expectations. Marketing communications play a very important role in this. The role a market research department can play in the overall service design is enormous. It is also interesting to understand how other organizational functions like front line executives, project management executives play a role in how close a firm delivers the services when compared to the expected services. One more common-sensical derivation out of this model is the importance of communications – both internal and external.

Employees as the brand ambassadors

The concept of ‘all-in-the-organization-should-embrace-service-quality’ is keen in a highly successful services business. If you have attended any training on corporate values, you would have come across an exercise to define your role as

At XYZ, my job is to…’

For an employer, this helps to set the vision and mission imbibed in its employees' mind. Also, this helps in making the employees part of the team and co-own the quality of services it provides to the customer. It not only opens our mind-set, but also shows the shortcomings and changes need to be in place. The importance of ‘point of view’ is the key factor here. Some of the aspects discussed during classes like, job rotation, including service delivery quality and customer satisfaction in every one’s key performance indicators are practical ideas to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of service design and delivery. Commitment from top management as in the case of other functional strategies is equally important in the case of service delivery too. The role of internal marketing and buy-in from all stakeholders is ever more important in running a successful service business. Here is a great example of how this is achieved in Cold Stone Creamery

The role of support organization

I believe combining services and products is still the practical way to achieving customer delight. The importance given to services and support holds more importance and can drive the business. However it should not be taken to an extend that it is taken as a negative factor – for example I have seen some software product based companies providing products at a cheaper rate and milking the customer in the name of after sales support and services. Customers will take this direction in the right sense as long as the services provided are genuine and value for money. We often see mockery of customer satisfaction surveys done in companies.

Another challenge is the result of average ratings. It’s a human nature to give an average rating in surveys instead of moving towards extremes. To manage this, options like open questions need to be utilized. For example, – ‘What improvement or addition in our service will encourage you to provide a higher rating than provided?’ The next key step to build an amazing services organization is to share the feedback results across the organization. Responsibilities for the lower ratings need to be shared and co-owned across teams; often what we see if the survey results don't pass down the line. Technology enables us to also collect feedback from multiple channels; an organization should judiciously make use of this as well.

Though we talk about 7Ps in Services Marketing, there is an eight P that we need to be careful about -- People and Promise; tools like moments of truth aid in this. Finally, designing the service effectively is the core to success. Tools like service blue printing provides interesting and insightful thoughts on designing a service. For example, have a look at the blueprint created for a clinic using the Service Design tools.

What do you think are the three key ingredients to have a successful services business?

Journey of Bru Coffee through its commercials

2018-11-09T17:04:00.000+05:30

Continuing from the discussion we had about the evolution journey of Surf Excel through its commercials; today we will quickly breeze through another brand - Bru Coffee. Bru Instant Coffee product line is yet another successful brand from Hindustan Unilever in India for decades.

Brief History of Bru Coffee

A nice and interactive timeline of Bru is provided in their website. HUL launched its coffee powder under the name Brooke Bond Green Label in 1962. India being a tea nation; at that time perhaps this was the first branded entry by any company into coffee market. This could be the reason why HUL extended the brand of Brook Bond which is the famous tea brand name. The instant coffee market was perhaps born in 1968 with Bru Instant. Since then, Bru product line has seen new introduction, re-branding and pruning of variants. As of today, Bru Coffee is available in for four variants - Bru Gold, Bru Instant, Bru Select and Bru Roast & Ground

Association with filter coffee

I couldn't find any commercials from the seventies for Bru. If you find any, please do share; it will be interesting to watch those advertisements. The oldest Bru ad I could find on the internet is one from late eighties. During the earlier commercials, Bru used the comparison approach (stereotype to create an association in consumer behavior vocabulary) to attract those drinking filter coffee. At that time, coffee was the dominant hot drink perhaps only in the southern part of India. And filter coffee in particular used to be THE choice. So this association was needed during the initial days. Another close association the ad is trying to make is its connection with the traditions of South India (both in terms of visuals and voice overs).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0-eOJyhM50

Transition to its own category of instant coffee

Association with filter coffee continued for may be about the entire nineties. Check out the Malayalam Ad. If we forward a bit, the feature based themes were also used in the advertisements. For example, watch the below ad which focuses on how tasty Bru is. The entire voice over goes through new taste and aroma. This is perhaps the transition phase of moving away from the association with filter coffee and of being its own product category. Here is a pan India ad in Hindi that showcases both these themes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdRtXoS1t_w

Moving towards slice-of-life themes

Fast forward to 2000's, the brand started using slice-of-life themes with subtle indications of aroma and taste of the coffee. One interesting piece that is clearly evident from the ads during these period is the careful selection of life sequences and target segment -- Young middle class with aspirations. For example, watch the below ad which showcases a new generation daughter trying to introduce to her father, her boy-friend. Though the daughter is not able to put forth the idea of having a meeting; father understand about it after drinking a cup of Coffee. The key ingredient to the success of this campaign is two-fold. Firstly, it gels well with the target audience and secondly the shoot is perfect. For example, all aspects like whether showcasing the brand name, packaging or ingredients of the Coffee is executed perfectly. Earlier theme aspects like aroma and taste are subtly included in the pictuarization.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=448mx762l0I

Happiness Begins with Bru!

A campaign that gave the brand a big boost is the Happiness Begins with Bru. The first commercial in this sequence was again a slice-of-life theme showcasing a day of a young couple; wife announcing that she is pregnant symbolically by giving a small cup of Bru to her husband. Have a watch of the ad. Once again all aspects of the brand is well captured in the video - be the subtlety used for aroma, packaging, taste etc. or the connection with its target audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzm23U7GGRc

The brand has continued with a similar theme of 'with-bru-comes-a-good-mood' commercials (Ek Cup Bru Aur Mood Ban Jayae). Once again the target segment is kept well under consideration. One sequence showcases a wife having a bad day; yet giving her husband a cup of coffee. After taking a sip and mesmerized by the taste; the husband tries to calm her down by giving a foot massage!). The second sequence follows a similar path of showcasing a young couple's day in which the husband dedicates a song in radio for his wife after having the Bru coffee.

Jingles and Humor

The motivator behind this blog post is one of their long running commercials. One day, I noticed my wife inadvertently singing the jingle while making coffee/during discussions. The ad is the one showcasing 'yet another young couple' in which the wife sings a song about how to make the best coffee! The song is all about teaching her husband how to make the coffee by using two cups, Bru, water, sugar and milk. The jingle is so perfectly recorded that you get tempted to sing it like a song (a special mention needs to be done in making the dubbing across language perfectly)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K7eQ30p-6A

In the states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the brand has used the celebrities Karthi and Kajal Agrawal in a set of commercials ranging from the successful & long aired husband-makes-coffee-for-wife to the latest son-knows-father ad.

Having said that, it doesn't mean the brand had always made successful campaigns; I would consider few flop series were also there. Interestingly these included big celebrities as well. For example, have a look at this ad featuring Shahid Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra for Bru Lite Coffee. The whole sequence tries to mimic the above mentioned ad related to Ek Cup Bru Aur Mood Ban Jayae; but the complete focus seems to have been on the celebrities; they even forgot to have a branded coffee mug!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3D4f0fMtzM

Love is Bru

Come 2016, the brand has gone one step forward with a commercial and tag line - Love is Bru. In the latest and greatest installment, Bru has used a life-of-slice theme. In this, the wife gives more coffee to her successful husband who is under office pressure. He asks her why and she states he is the breadwinner and undergoing lots of sacrifice and stress. The husband returns the favour stating the sacrifices she has done for him and the family can't be matched by anything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx0sVMm-xC8

What do you think about this latest advertisement from Bru Coffee and how the brand has evolved…?

What is Customer Engagement Score?

2018-11-06T14:38:00.000+05:30

Getting a loyal customer is a marketer’s objective; making them a brand advocate is attaining nirvana! Customer Journey, Brand Advocacy, Net Promoter Score, Customer Engagement Score, Moments of Truth etc. are all terms associated with this. A recent article that I read, brought back memories of Customer Engagement Score.

What is Customer Engagement Score?

Simply put, customer engagement score is a magic number that helps you understand how engaged are your customers with your brand.Keeping a tap on the customer engagement score helps you not only to identify unhappy customers; but also come up with opportunities of enhancing their experience and up-sells.

Calculating the engagement score is perhaps the trickiest part. A mere high volume of engagement of users with a product doesn’t always mean a positive note — it could be just that they are spending too much time to understand how to use your service! Here is a good article I cam across on deriving engagement score.

Components of Customer Engagement Score

As mentioned above, deriving the engagement score is unique to each business. It depends on multiple factors, customer touch points and usage levels. It also depends on aspects like demographics, level of need etc. The article I mentioned in the beginning was one such research from Oxford Brooks University . It’s about understanding the factors that influence a customer’s overall engagement with a brand; specifically how emotions and demographics play key roles.

Again, due to the very tricky nature of deriving a single number capturing the engagement, I felt the research is skewed based in industries selected. For example, it said — between married and unmarried; the married showed better engagement score and when it comes countries/regions Turkish, Brazilian and American consumers showed a better customer engagement score when compared to Scandinavian Countries and the UK. Does this mean go more digital in the US and Brazil and less in the UK ?

In my opinion, branding is again the key factor. Let’s assume the brand is Babyhug which brings out baby products.So we can expect more of young parents to be following the product or someone who could be either old/young who has a baby in the family might be engaged with the product. They will definitely show a better customer engagement score irrespective of the country/region/sex/marital status. What are the factors that the marketers are looking forward while defining the customer engagement ratios? Thus defining customer engagement score is solely dependent on the brand and industry.

Moments of Truth and Customer Engagement Score

The key part in defining any customer journey is identifying moments of truth.Moments of truth are handshakes between the customer and an organization in a manner that customer forms an opinion about the organization’s service/product offering. It can also be considered as the instance that gives and opportunity to the organization or customer to change the opinion of the service. These will also be the key ingredients of calculating customer engagement scores. For example — how many touch points or how much involvement is required in each moment of truth etc.

Information explosion and access to channels has made a marketer’s life difficult. For example, how is the marketing, advertising, re-targeting, on-boarding and servicing is inter-linked to generate a WOW-making customer experience?Starting from branding, each and every touch-point is important. For example, a simple gesture such as, a children’s clinic calling back parents to check on how well their kid is doing after consultation or a restaurant making a call to a couple for wishing them for their anniversary etc. are some of the practices that are already in place and which results in loyalty.

Above all that there should be no compromise on the quality of the products, which definitely increases the confidence of a customer gradually building his customer engagement score and also the options such as recommend the product to your friends might definitely help since it makes sure that the customer who buys the product actually likes it and he is letting his friends (who is more likely to buy same kind of products) aware of that.

Do Freemium models always succeed?

2018-10-31T14:24:00.001+05:30

Pricing Strategy classes at B School usually touch upon Freemium models as a pricing model. This is a model that has become relevant perhaps in the last decade or so. The advent of mobile apps and Software as a Service (SaaS) model getting more prevalence, the concept of Freemium has become an important strategy to evaluate.

I believe we can consider freemium models as an extension of what we used to call in new product development – prototype. Essentially freemium model is an extension of this concept. Technology has enabled ‘providing for free and test the market ‘ easier to achieve and expand. This model enables to scale focus groups in virtual format. Access to usage data and the granularity or depth one can achieve these days provides great potential if you come from the product management side.

Benefits of Freemium Models

Though freemium may have had its starting point in new product development school, they got prominence more as a marketing strategy especially for start ups. It helps in multiple folds –

User base development – providing for free can usually attract users.
A decent user base means a tested market opportunity for your product.
Identifying brand advocates – early adopters may become loyalists and brand advocates. It can also help in creating the buzz.
Upsell premium offerings to free users.
Get funding to improve your product ☺

But is Freemium model a successful pricing strategy? Harvard professor Vineet Kumar in his article Making Freemium Work discusses about the key factors that enhances the possibility of a successful freemium business model. In a nutshell, they are

Judicious selection between free and premium features – The selection should attract enough users to the free offering; at the same time should not be a blockage to upgrade in the case of target customers for paid offering.

Communicating clearly the benefit of premium offering – Clear differentiation between the two offering upfront will definitely add value to a prospective customer in evaluation.

Tweaking the offerings based on conversion rate – It is said that the general conversion rate from a free offering to paid one is less than 5%. So depending on what’s the conversion rate a business is achieving, we would need to tweak the features in each offering.

Developing an efficient referral strategy – Referrals are one way to cash out free users. Developing a good strategy around this concept can accelerate the use base. One typical example is dropbox.

Improving feature set – The company needs to be committed in developing both free and premium features based on the usage pattern it sees. This keep existing user base engaged and attract new ones.

In addition to these, I believe there are two more things one need to consider to make freemium model successful

Promoting free offering equally. Often one mistake I have seen is the firm devote the budget for premium compared to the free offering. Both are equally important.
Providing a natural progression from free to premium. The feature sets should be chosen in such a way that existing free users see a requirement in progressing to the premium version. This often requires some trial and error to reach the optimal set.

Latest unicorns – Chief Marketing Technologists

2018-10-29T15:44:00.000+05:30

It was Gartner and HBR who formalized the role of Chief Marketing Technologist in 2014. Three years hence, I think this is a role still evolving; and in the early stages. It is now a well-known fact that the impact of technology on marketing and advertising is enormous.What is more key is the fact that, technology enables a marketer to personalize the message, segment better and reach the optimal set of prospective customers.

Invasion of Technology over Marketing

A recent report from emarketer indicates that marketers are increasingly using technology to better understand customers and needs. At the same time, they are using it significantly to keep up with competition. A look at the martech landscape published by chiefmartech or adtech landscape published by Luma Partners indicates the number of companies playing in this field and the complexity it has created. 2016 saw lot of consolidation and it is expected that two key things will happen in 2017 — more consolidation and better integration among offerings. I am sure Google and Facebook will continue to be the frontrunners.

Another key aspect is the invasion of analytics and data science as you would have expected

Defining Marketing Technology

Chiefmartech blog by Scott Brinker is perhaps the undisputed resource on learning about the domain. Here is also a short podcast from eMarketer.

Understanding the role of Chief Marketing Technologist

Three keys skills relate to CMTO role — Marketing, Technology and Business acumen. Technology enables the marketer to be more analytical.There are many factors that impact the adoption of Chief Marketing Technologist role ranging from ego clashes to technical know-how. It’s a question of whether the CMO becoming more tech savvy or the CIO becoming more Marketing savvy or creating an altogether new persona.

A Chief Marketing Technologist is expected to achieve three key objectives

Aid the Chief Marketing Officer to better reach the right prospects with the help of technology
Formulate a backbone of technology and framework that helps end-to-end customer relations starting from creating awareness to creating loyalists
Champion across the organization; the idea of coexistence of marketing and technology to achieve organizational goals and vision

Book Summary: Time Power by Brian Tracy

2018-09-05T18:45:00.000+05:30

Brian starts the book with usual motivational stuff to attract to the book and time management in general. He talks about the 3 myths or barriers to time management everyone may face:

It affects the naturalness and spontaneity (You will lead a mechanical life!)
Negative Mental Programming (I am like this by birth :) )
Self Limiting Beliefs (I don't have the ability!)

Brian continues the book by explaining some of the techniques you can use to be more effective and improve your performance like:

1. Use positive self talk. He stresses how having reiterative positive self-talk can have an impact
2. Visualize yourself as highly efficient. He proposes to keep high visualizations of success - be it posters, mental visualizations or positive self-talks.
3. Act the part. Start doing as if you have reached the goal. For example, if you were aiming to be a manager; start thinking and opining like a business manager.
4. Benchmark against the best. Have a role model
5. Become a Teacher
6. Be a role model to others.

I liked the three Self Esteem Builders :

Determining Your Values
Striving for Mastery
Knowing What you Want

This book is full of good tips and tricks like:

Twelve Proven Principles for Peak Performance
The Seven Practices of Time Power
How to achieve your goals faster and remove the obstacles.

Some of the tips that Brian Tracy explains in this book are:

new habit pattern formation takes about 21 days of practice and repetition

Your ability to clearly and systematically create goals, and plans for their accomplishment, will help you more to achieve success and happiness than any other skill you could develop

I liked the four ideas for personal organization:

1. Neatness Is a Key Habit
2. Stand Back and Evaluate Yourself
3. Refuse to Make Excuses
4. Work from a Clean Desk

Further, Brian explains in detail how to set the priorities. Nice to see he also mentions the Pareto's Principle

Four Steps to High Productivity:

1. Set clear written goals & objectives
2. Develop detailed plan of action for aceiveing your goal
3. Set clear priorities
4. Concentrate single mindedly on important thing you can do to achieve your set goal

When you accept complete responsibility for achieving your goal, people will emerge to help you and guide you along the path to your success. But when you make excuses, blame others, and expect them to help you, they will ignore you and avoid you. When you look to yourself first, you are far more likely not only to be more successful, but to attract into your life the support of the people you need. If you look to other people to help you achieve your goals, you will almost always be disappointed.

Just for Fun! Five random bloopers from the net!

2018-08-29T23:39:00.000+05:30

We come across online bloopers everyday in the internet – be it from individuals or brands. It not only lightens up your day; but also provide an opportunity to learn. Here is a quick compilation of five such bloopers. Have you come across similar ones…do share them as comments!

Facebook What’s on your mind?

Off-late Facebook has been trying hard to get what’s in your mind – based on your location, mood, and what not. I am sure you would have seen it prompting the use to share some common events like matches, celebrations and so on. Here is one such attempt that I felt was not that appropriate…

A Feature gone wrong — How can a Texas vs Patriots NFL match be relevant to a person in Kochi who doesn’t even know ABCs of American Football

Sharing Content for the sake of it!

Here is a typical blooper you will encounter often. Simply sharing for the sake of it. It’s amazing to see this can even happen from the Gurus of inbound marketing!

Dennis Ritchie passed away in 2011! It was not just Dharmesh; even Google’s Sundar Pichai tweeted the same!

Google Adsense and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) use the same logo!

It’s bizarre to see the same logo being used in two products of the big brand like Google – Adsense and AMP. More importantly, in adsense its used for an ‘un-available’ reporting option and in the second case as the denotation for showing mobile-friendliness of the page!

Performance Reports > New Report > Filter > URL Channels

AMP Logo in Mobile Search Results

Flipkart Lite goes wrong?

While window shopping Flipkart in mobile site; came across this interesting offering Looks like either its a bug or a caching issue; anyway it would have been interesting to get camera lenses at toothbrush holders’ price levels!

A bug in live? If such cross-over products are there; it will be interesting

Sharing 404 pages!

This is yet another common blooper witnessed. You share a webpage, which is already moved or deleted. Here is one from Hootsuite CEO; that too about an important announcement!

Interestingly, someone wants to connect based on the page!

What are some of the bloopers you have come across…?

Travel Diary: Two Day Trip (Shirdi – Nashik – Pune)

2018-08-23T18:12:00.000+05:30

We went on a quick trip to Western part of India; specifically to Shirdi. Though visiting Shirdi was our primary goal, we decided to spend time visiting Nashik and a bit Pune. With a baby, that’s all what we could cover in four days from Kochi.

Our flight from Kochi to Pune was on a Friday afternoon. We decided to directly goto Shirdi. We reached Shirdi by around 9 in the night.

Shirdi

It was my visit to Shirdi. We were barely on time to attend the night Aarti. There are two main aartis in a day. Kakad Aarti at 4:30 in the morning and Shej Aarti at 10:30 in the night. There will be a long queue depending on timing and season. I felt the place has become more a tourist place; you can if sight Pizza Hut or Mc Donald’s. The roads adjacent to the temple premises are full of hotels. The restaurants are expensive; though you can find some budget hotels as well. We stayed in a hotel named Temple View. It was a good one and close to the entrance of temple.

Nashik

Post darshan at Shirdi in the morning, we decided to cover Nashik on the second day. On the way, we had our lunch at Purohit’s Thali Restaurant. It was a great and authentic meal.

Trimbakeshwar Shiva Temple

Our first target in Nashik was yet another temple — Trimbakeshwar Shiva Temple. The temple is an ancient one and an architectural marvel. Coming from South India, the architecture, customs and look of the temple was amazing. Again, you can expect long queues depending on the time of visit and season. Please note that photography is not allowed in any of these temples and fast queue based on payment are available.

Sula Vineyards

Our next target was Sula Vineyards. We wanted to try out both the tour and wine testing :). This was a good experience with the visit to entire Vineyard – yard, factory, storage and so on. Finally you get to taste five to six wines also. In total, it may take around an hour or two here. The tour operates every hour.

Panchvati

Our final destination for the day was Panchvati. Though it made the trip a complete pilgrimage; I like this place the most. We hired an auto (I think this is the best option) to take us to all the temples in Panchvati. The driver was a good person, knowledgeable about the stories behind each place. There are around nine temples in Panchvati. Among them, the one that I liked much was Sita Gumpha. The main temple here is Kalaram Temple built by Sardar Odhekar of Peshwa in 18th century. Here is a good video I came across in YouTube related to Panchvati

Shani Shingnapur

On the final day, we went back to Pune. En route, Our first target for the day was Shani Shingnapur. Comparatively, this was the temple with less crowd and streamlined queue system.The interesting fact about this place is that none of the houses have doors. The people believe that no theft will happen because of fear of Shani God.

Post this, we visited more temples; this time couple of Ganesha temples. And thus making the trip a complete pilgrimage. At Pune, we stayed in St. Laurn Business Hotel at Koregaon Park.

Darshan Museum

Though we couldn’t visit many places in Pune; we managed to visit Darshan Museum. It was a different experience. It is a biographical museum about the life and teachings of Sadhu T. L. Vaswani. What makes the experience different is that, they have made the tour technologically advanced by including audio-visual and affects. Something similar to Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress at Disney World.

Overall a memorable trip; also the first flight journey for our little princess 🙂

Social Diary: Vinayak Lohani, a man who dedicated his life for child welfare

2018-08-22T17:28:00.000+05:30

Source: Wikipedia

While browsing through the new additions in Google Talks, I noticed one by Vinayak Lohani, the founder of Parivaar an NGO for Child Education. This brought me back, the memories of Social Entrepreneurship classes at IIM Bangalore and interactions with him. This blog post is a culmination of few notes back from those days and the Google Talk.

A path, different from the usual brain drain

Vinayak Lohani is a simple man with few words and wonderful actions! As an elite member of the esteemed group – IIT-IIM alumni; one would expect him to be sitting at some corner office in the US heading a company or working on the next million dollar deal. Instead, Vinayak chose to work for the society, to help destitute children get educated. Vinayak is a man with tremendous energy, passion and self-belief who showed we can make a difference in society if we intend to do so. It can be with any initiatives irrespective of how small they are in the beginning. What is important is, tremendous courage and self-belief to pursue one’s passion especially if it is in the development sector.

About Parivaar

Vinayak Lohani’s Parivaar is a humanitarian service organization, based in West Bengal working for total care and overall development of children from unprivileged and exploited categories. Vinayak’s ideology, empowerment being more important than charity work is clearly evident from the way Parivaar has been functioning. Parivaar admits children in the age group of 4-10 and are given all necessary academic, extracurricular and vocational training till they are ready to take care of themselves for a job or higher education.

Today, Parivaar is very successful that it get thousands of applications and they have to screen to admit the most needed children. From a rented building in the beginning, the organization has grown to 20 acre, 2 campus structure which can admit over 3000 students.

Vinayak has a different school of thought that, it is the individual who make decisions or donations and hence its always better to associate with individuals rather than institutions. It is very true that a mass support with even a token contribution can make enough capital for an initiative to succeed. This was exactly what Vinayak managed to do with his alumni network. He believes that everyone talks only about macro level impacts whereas micro level activity is also equally important. He stuck on to his beliefs and started Parivaar with 3-5 children. It is very true that even if small if we can make a life changing impact; it is worth doing it. It is also important that concentrating at an individual level with all the stakeholders achieves the credibility and intimacy factors – whether it is with the children, donors or volunteers.

Empathizing with and belief in people are key to successfully making an impact and empower the impoverished. We can see this clearly in the case of Parivaar. For example, Vinayak who is not a native of West Bengal was able to overcome the language barrier with the emotional connect he was able to make. The belief that all have the required capabilities and enabling the improvised to make them achieve anything is a unique thought we can see in him and Paivaar. A broad vision and the core values in sustenance are what guide any such social entrepreneurs.

Starting from small things and slowly scaling up with enhanced activities will result in the empowerment and wide levels of impact. Clear examples can be taken from Parivaar also. He talks about children who lost 3-4 years of education in the early childhood are able to perform well like others in Class 11 after concrete efforts at Parivaar shows how quality and sincere efforts can achieve the vision.

It’s worth commenting that, Parivaar also has other projects like food stock scheme for tribes, support for women etc. This also shows how a social venture can slowly widen its efforts for a bigger impact. It more impressive that they are able to do this with just individual contributions. A helpful hint that we need to closely work with those who are already in the sector to understand what the ground reality is very true.

Another interesting learning from these talks is about the amount of hand-holding NGOs in these sectors do – for example, Vinayak talks about the first batches of children he originally inducted are now in the job market and Parivaar continues to support them in whichever way they can.

Few takeaways for any aspiring social entrepreneur will be

Belief in people and enabling them by working along with them will empower them irrespective of the background.
Societal change is not all about the macro level impact; individual and grass root level initiatives are equally important for empowerment of the impoverished.
We can start from nothing; all that is required is the passion and be ready to empathize with them.
There is generally no blue print approach in development sector. The right direction of plans evolves from experience
Vinayak also shares his experiences about the societal pressure while pursuing a different passion, that too after an elite education. The difficulties in building one’s credibility, challenges in initial faces of an initiative discussed are all insightful.

It’s truly inspiring to go through the stories of such social entrepreneurs!

Travel Diary: A short road trip to Wayand from Kochi

2018-08-22T16:18:00.000+05:30

During the weekend of Christmas last year, we decided to have a quick trip to Wayanad from Kochi. It was the first trip of our 10 months old little angel. Though we were bit nervous;at the end she enjoyed the most 🙂 Since we were also accompanied by our parents, it was a bit less-adventurous journey.

Soochipara Waterfalls

We started at around 6AM; took North Paravur route instead of the usual Alwaye-Thrissur route. We had booked at Best Western Plus Ekobarn around 2PM. We decided to cover Chembra side. Since it was already evening, we could see only Soochipara Waterfalls. Meenumutty falls was closed. One should keep in mind that, these destinations are open only untill 5PM for entry. Since monsoon was poor in 2017, overall the weather was not good. We were expecting chill; while it was as hot as Kochi!

Wildlife Sanctuaries in Wayanad

The second day we decided to cover two wildlife sanctuaries. Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary was closed due to worker strike. But the journey via jungle was awesome. It’s easy to find deers, monkeys etc on your jungle ride itself. If lucky, it was mentioned even spotting elephants is possible.

While coming back, we decided to visit Thirunelli Temple. A very old temple; still maintained in its same fashion (without much commercial aspects added). Its situated on top of the hill. The ambience itself is great.

Kuruvadweep

Our next destination was Kuruva Islands. I must say this was one of the disappointing destinations; partly because of the hype created and partly because of the weather. The key attraction is a very shot bamboo rafting required to reach the island. Then its a long walk through preserved forest area. It’s rich in its flora and fauna; but enjoying the experience depend on the time of visit. At the end of the long walk is water-interlock of Kabini river created by rocks. It’s a great ambience and fun.

Lakkidi

While coming back, we stopped at Lakkidi viewpoint. This was one of the most memorable sights for me. One could get the complete view of downtown, hairpins and the roads. Our final destination during this trip was Pookode lake.Its a natural freshwater lake with walkways around it and surrounded by forest. Once again, if we had chosen a better time to visit.

Here is the Wayanad-Flickr Album.

Overall a mixed feeling especially due to the hype Wayanad has. I felt Munnar was much better 🙂 it was a love at first sight for Munnar…

Note: Originally Posted in BuLiTe blog in Jan/2018.

Humorous Ads – Do they have better brand recall?

2017-10-31T14:36:00.000+05:30

Humor as an advertising theme is a time tested one. The biggest challenge of picking up and executing humorous ads is in its inherent possibility of alienating viewers. For example – though no pun intended, if the advertisement mock at some sector or demographics, it may fail (for example, Flipkart Assured commercial showcasing Gurkhas as watchmen)

Curating the ad in the right way will result in attractiveness and better recall. Humor as a theme has couple of advantages

It can attract all if done right
The length of ads could be optimized
The re-call factor and psychological connection with the brand could be accelerated

Cricbuzz Advertisement

Let’s consider a slightly old example of a humorous ads – cricbuzz advertisement during last Cricket World Cup Series.

It’s a 24 sec ad which in my opinion has succeeded in implanting ‘cricbuzz’ as a cricket update app in most of the viewers. The length is small when compared to other ads; it grabs attention, make the viewer smile , followed by showcasing cricbuzz as THE cricket update ad.

Cadbury’s Dil Jo Keh Raha Hai Suno

Let’s now take the example of Cadbury’s Dil Jo Keh Raha Hai Suno ad. Shown in various lengths, this is a good example of how humor can be effectively utilized to catch the attention of a viewer from ad clutter, implant a strong brand message and even make viewers eager to watch it again!. I am sure, irrespective of age and gender, everyone would have smiled while watching the ad. Also, the curator has not taken any pun, exaggeration or sarcasm to give the humorous flavor; instead taken a possible slice of life adaption.

Amazon Pranks (April Fool)

Now, let’s shift our focus from TV commercials to Digital world. On April Fool’s day, Amazon India decided to play some prank and attract visitors to its website. Once again, a beautiful idea, executed well. Amazon emails and home page showcase something like below

Did you see it? Did you fell prey for it? Didn’t you laugh a bit? Amazon also beautifully utilized this opportunity to introduce of the new launches which I am sure many would have at least visited the individual web pages; if not bought something!

So what do you think about humor as an advertising technique? Do they have better viewership, and better brand recall?

Book Review- Dead Companies Walking by Scott Fearon

2017-05-27T19:33:00.000+05:30

A career in the likes of Private Equity, Venture Capital or Hedge Funds is a dream for many MBAs and students in Finance domain. Not only students, but also professionals look forward to reading books and resources on their domain to learn, understand and improve how they approach the work. Dead Companies Walking: How a Hedge Fund Manager finds Opportunity in Unexpected Places by Scott Fearon is one such book to look forward to.

About Scott Fearon

Scott Fearon is the president of Capital Crown Management, an investment management / hedge fund firm. With over 39 years of experience in the financial services industry, his key differentiation is to invest in fast-growing companies with little analyst coverage while shorting those in the downward spiral. He writes at his blog, The confessions of a contrarian investor The confessions of a contrarian investor.

About the book

As opposed to the general theme of ‘how to select good stocks’ of books in this genre; Dead Companies Walking is all about how to identify the companies which are going to bust and exit from them tactically. This is basically a memoir of the author rather than principles around the topic. What makes the book attractive is the quantum of real life examples he gives.

Written in close to 250 pages, the book is grouped in six themes to look for to identify companies that are going to bust. These are essentially six key decision-making mistakes by executives that lead to failures. They are

Not keeping track of historical events and mistakes – Often executives try to make decisions out of the recent past.This blinds the mistakes and changes happened in the long past; eventually leading to same mistakes.
Over dependency on success formulas – Often managers tends overly focus on few metric, be EBITA or growth rate to sooth their current performance. This leads to blinding them from changing contexts.
Forgetting customers in the name of hyper growth – This is a common mistake we see in companies going through growth phase. They become overly confident to the extend of alienating customers – be it from quality of offerings or service perspective.
Jumping into a bandwagon that’s a mania – The author takes examples from 2000 dotcom busts like women.com that overly go into fads than facts.
Becoming irrelevant due to industry shifts – This relates to the lack of focus on how the environment is changing. This being a menace to the extent that executives fail to identify the business models becoming obsolete (Example – e-commerce v/s Brick and Motor)
Closeness of executives to companies’ operations – This is something that I couldn’t completely agree especially because of the nature of advancements technology has made. But, this completely makes sense in a ‘physical touchpoint’ based business. Scott starts the chapter with the example how he felt it odd about JC Penney’s CEO being away from his headquarters and managing the business.

Though the book is mainly about shorting stocks; he also talks about taking long positions and mistakes he made around missing stellar opportunities. Finally, a chapter is devoted on the shortcomings of Wall Street analysts. The thoughts in this chapter included why groupthink and mistakes are prevalent in Wall Street community.

Scott concludes his book with a chapter on the importance of embracing failures/mistakes and moving forward.

Overall a light read; more of a memoir. Don’t expect financial theory wisdom in this book.

Internet of Things – Implementations for a Better India

2017-03-12T10:36:00.000+05:30

Guest Blog Post by Prashanth Thimmavajjala

Prashanth is an MBA graduate from IIM Bangalore, currently working in the testing domain and is still trying for an opportunity to crack into the management world from the technology world. He has published multiple papers for PMI conferences and other forums.

Internet of things(IOT) is kind of new, happening and there is a whole lot of buzz around it. According to Gartner, Internet of things is the network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate and sense or interact with their internal states or external environment. It is in simple terms multiple sensors installed on various objects/devices/things that would collect data on specific parameters that can be later used for decision-making or controlling the devices.

Many big companies have put their hat in the ring for Internet of Things. Companies like Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM to name a few. Going through their webpages gives a lot of detailed information on the interesting work they are doing in this space and also a lot of interesting applications like smart grids for utilities, connected factories, transportation and preventive maintenance.

With most of these case studies being on implementations done outside India, it just got me thinking as what could be the possible implementations that could be done in various sectors in India that could benefit the country as a whole. I have attempted to list down a few sectors where implementing such a technology will be beneficial in the long run.

Agriculture

This sector is unarguably the main stay for India. Internet of things can be used to make the agricultural practices better and thereby producing better yield.

Smart Irrigation systems

Irrigation is vital for good crop yield and there are challenges in getting the right amount of water to be supplied to the fields. With sensors installed in the soil and to the irrigation supply system, water levels in the soil can be replenished whenever the soil sensors indicate low water density to ensure adequate irrigation to the crops thereby benefiting the yield.

Smart Water pumps

Indian company PlaySolar is already doing a great service to the agricultural sector by introducing Solar powered water pumps to overcome the challenge of frequent power cuts, they have also integrated sensors to the solar water pump to monitor them remotely and also for preventive maintenance. Even without the solar panel, having water pumps that could be installed with sensors will help in monitoring the performance of the pumps and also proactively perform maintenance activities before the pump fails thereby reducing down time.

Smart equipment

Tractors and crop machines are the backbone of mechanized agriculture. They are generally shared across farmers and any repair during the peak season of ploughing or harvesting will result in huge losses due to time delay. Companies like Mahindra, Massey Ferguson, Caterpillar etc which are in the business of providing these equipment sometimes take days to reach the remote villages to perform the necessary repairs. If the machines had sensors installed in them that would relay performance related data of these machines to a centralized server managed by the company, the company could take proactive steps as soon as a possible failure is identified and perform the necessary repairs before the machine goes down thereby increasing the uptime of the machines and the productivity of the farming community and minimizing the losses.

Smart storage

Most of the agricultural produce fails to reach the market due to lack of adequate storage facilities and also improper storage which results in spoilage and wastage. The government has taken adequate measures to improve the storage facilities but internet of things could just bring in an additional benefit. Storage facilities could have sensors which are monitored at a central location like the Food corporation of India HQ where vitals like room temperature, heat, light etc can be monitored and corrective actions can be taken to maintain these vitals in the optimum range as per the produce that is stored in the facility. This would help in the produce getting the optimal temperature, air, moisture, heat, light etc and prevent it from getting spoilt thereby ensuring that it reaches the market

Allied activities

Activities like sericulture, horticulture, prawn farming, fisheries etc are also dependent a lot on adequate temperature and climatic conditions for a successful yield. Improper conditions could lead to heavy losses. The implementation that I explained above for Smart storage can be used for these activities as well with centralized monitoring.

Healthcare

IOT has been around in healthcare probably since its discovery especially in advanced countries. There is a vast population of India that do not have access to the best of medical facilities when they need it. Indian firm LifePlot already has a low-cost connected care device that enables to collect vital medical information through ECG and will wirelessly transmit the data to a medical practitioner for remote diagnosis and care. The potential of such a device is huge given the vast population in remote corners of the country and the best medical facilities being concentrated in a few areas. The only challenge will be to have the necessary infrastructure in place in terms of connectivity and service for the success of this solution.

Enabling the differently abled

In those many case studies I read about IOT on various sites, I could find very few of them actually addressing a social cause. Most companies were trying to portray savings in smart power grids as a social cause which I felt was deceptive. One of the solutions I really thought could have a good social benefit was the smart home feature that most of these major companies had. Smart home basically is sensors on all your home appliances that will enable you to control the devices as well as the devices to perform actions on their own based on data. So you could turn on your air conditioner when you are about to reach your home and your coffee maker could automatically start preparing coffee for you as soon as it is 7 AM etc.

Smart home solution could be something that could be used to enable the differently abled. They could control all the devices around them using a single tab. The devices could also be empowered to make some basic decisions like for example the refrigerator could automatically detect that there is low quantity of a particular food item and automatically raise an order for replenishment to the nearest grocery store or to something like BigBasket saving a lot of overhead for someone who is differently abled. The tab could also have braille buttons for someone who is visually challenged also to be able to operate it. Home appliance companies can provide the service of remotely monitoring the performance of the appliances in the home and perform preventive maintenance thereby saving the ordeal of a repair for the differently abled person. Home security solutions will also be helpful for such people as it can enable them to alert the police and neighborhood in case of any emergency.

Personal safety

Safety of women and children is a growing concern in India. The rise in crimes against women and children in various parts of the country is shameful and disturbing. One possible solution could be providing an IOT sensor based identity card which will enable them to be tracked from a centralized location like the police headquarters, there could also be a beacon button which can be activated in case of an emergency so that the police force knows that there is a problem and the exact location as well to take action. In schools or colleges, this could be used for monitoring the location of the child in the school and also they could have a feature like proximity sensor which might alert the school authorities when the identity card of an employee of the school is very near to the identity card of any child. Distributing this kind of device across the population without them knowing the technology or benefit behind it will be key for the success.

Smart Industries

This is a solution that all major IOT firms already have. This involves having sensors on various equipment within the industry and the supply chain for decision-making and centralized monitoring. The biggest benefit of this is the preventive maintenance capability where factory equipment can be monitored remotely and when there are signs of reduced production or possible repair, preventive steps and maintenance can be done to avoid down time and making the factory more productive. In India, the key challenge will be to develop a low-cost solution that can be used in all the MSMEs as they form the majority of the industries in the country.

Smart buildings

India’s vast population has enormous energy needs. In spite of having various projects for power generation, we are still reeling under power shortage with frequent and long power cuts. Using IOT in the new buildings that would get constructed will enable to prevent wastage of electricity and thereby ensure savings. This could be part of the Smart City initiative.

Power and Water supply

This implementation is something all the major IOT companies are boasting off about having implemented it in major cities across the world. Implementing smart grids for power and water supply to monitor usage and prevent wastage will be a challenge on existing networks in India as it is wide-spread and not highly organized like those in major cities of the world. New grids and new smart cities that are getting built will be ideal candidates for implementing such a smart grid.

Transportation

Transport networks in few of the major cities in the world have IOT already implemented. Implementing this in India would help in monitoring transport movement, preventive maintenance of transportation vehicles, monitoring fuel usage and emission and taking necessary preventive actions to bring them down to optimal ranges. Cars and bikes could also have sensors to enable centralized monitoring by the car or bike companies to monitor performance and perform preventive maintenance.

These are surely not the exhaustive list of the possible applications of IOT for a developing nation like India. These are just a few of them that came to my mind. However, for any of these ideas to be implemented in large-scale across the country, support from the government along with the adequate infrastructure will be key. There is a dire need for many startups to evolve in this space and come up with cost-effective solutions made within India for large-scale success.

There could be myriad of other areas of applications that I might have missed or overlooked. Also there could be a lot of companies and solutions that might be already addressing some of the problems I raised here.

Please feel free to comment about those and for any possible conflicting thoughts.

Organizational Stage and Leadership Needs – Tata Sons and Flipkart

2017-01-25T14:06:00.000+05:30

Guest Post by Prashanth Thimmavajjala
Prashanth is an MBA graduate from IIM Bangalore, currently working in the testing domain and is still trying for an opportunity to crack into the management world from the technology world. He has published multiple papers for PMI conferences and other forums.

Two of the most loved companies in India Tata Sons and Flipkart announced their new leaders N Chandrasekaran and Kalyan Krishnamurthy respectively. Both the decisions were much talked about in multiple forums, especially the decision with Flipkart causing some worry in startup circles. If we look at both these decisions from an Organizational stage perspective, both the decisions seem apt.

Both these firms have decided to bring in a non-founder to steer the firms to the next stage and both these firms are at different stages of organizational evolution. They have decided their next leader as per their stage of organizational evolution.

Tata Sons

The Tata Sons represent India for many of us and there would no one who doesn’t know the company (I have my own personal dream of working in one of the Tata firms before I retire to have that feeling of truly contributing to nation building). Being an extremely large conglomerate of firms from salt to software with complex cross holdings, managing the conglomerate is challenging. The Tatas have been managing this all these years within their family and close investors but this time their leadership decision ran into trouble and they had to get in a new leader. The Tata Sons are a mature conglomerate and running this cannot be done by an outsider or someone with less number of years with the firm. The Tatas have a legacy and a culture of their own and getting an outsider for the top job would mean a disaster. They cannot decide to bring in professional management like how Flipkart did because being in the system for long is key.

The Tata Sons are at a strategic inflection point where they need to rethink on their businesses in few sectors, focus on new sectors, handle legal issues they have been having and their expansion plans abroad. This needs a stronger and better connect to the system in Tata and a deep understanding of their businesses. The top job needs someone whom everyone can trust, someone who knows and connects well to the Tata legacy and someone who is part of the clan within the Tatas. N Chandrasekaran being a long timer with the Tatas and handling one of its largest businesses is easily the best man for the job. Being a close confidant of Tata and being in the system for long time helps in better and deeper understanding of the conglomerate aiding in better decision making as compared to a complete outsider.

Flipkart

Flipkart is undoubtedly the star of the startup ecosystem in India. Everyone loves the Flipkart story of evolution and continues to follow it with much interest. Flipkart has grown from a small startup, now into a “conglomerate of startups” like Jabong, Myntra etc. Flipkart has now reached a state where it needs to go beyond just outsmarting competition from Amazon and the likes to a stage where it needs to grow both organically and inorganically to stay in the game. In recent times, Flipkart has faced some serious trouble in terms of top level exits, funding crunch and devaluation by investors.

Flipkart is now in a stage where it needs to raise more funding to keep the ball rolling but its story is not very attractive to the investors now. Flipkart has reached a strategic inflection point where it needs to rethink its theory of business to keep growing as offering deep discounts can only bring them so far. The founders Sachin and Binny Bansal have got Flipkart to this point and this change in the strategic path needs new leadership – more professional and equipped.

Founders are generally more emotionally attached to their dream and might refrain from taking tough decisions regarding funding, acquisitions, downsizing and a whole lot of things which are needed to grow in size. This is one of the reasons most startups in the Silicon Valley change the leadership to more professional management after the startups reach a certain stage as founders are not very equipped to take decisions needed to take it to the next level and grow. So there is nothing new that Flipkart was doing but there is some tension as it is happening the first time in Indian startup space where founders were replaced at the top.

In the Flipkart group, Flipkart is truly the cash cow and the others are still growing and hence it is necessary to make it a strong firm to keep the entire group running. Flipkart needs to ready itself for public listing anytime soon to raise the additional funds it needs to grow, it might also give exit options to the existing investors. This calls for making the financials of Flipkart look strong and would need harsh decisions to improve margins and achieve a sustainable growth rate.

Flipkart’s growth will surely fuel the growth of other firms of the group by what is called as conglomerate discount in corporate strategy parlance. Once Flipkart seems strong and goes public, it will make it simpler to take the other group companies public as well or even take the entire group public. The additional funding will also help in making decisions regarding mergers and acquisitions of new firms into the Flipkart group. To reach this stage Kalyan Krishnamurthy suits best with his background in finance and online retailing.

A leader is meant to be the right fit to the organization at its current state and must be a person with the caliber required to the next desired state and both these firms have demonstrated how the stage of the organization decides the type of the leader it needs to move it to the next stage.

Is India ready for a cashless economy?

2016-11-16T16:52:00.000+05:30

India’s most radical national-level decision came in last week regarding the demonetization of the Rs 500 and Rs 1000 Notes. There are many near term and long term effects of this decision and many of us are eager to see things unfold. The biggest discussion point was that this move will be a major step towards a cashless economy. Companies like Paytm etc are gung-ho about this move and are preparing themselves for the major surge they expect in terms of cashless transactions. In my opinion, this is surely a big leap but there are many other systemic changes that need to be in place for our nation to go truly cashless.

The Indian love for cash: We as Indians are a big fan of having cash with us. Even if we have a numerous credit cards, debit cards and what not, we would still carry a small bunch of notes. Many of us treat plastic money as a backup for cash and not the other way around. The primary position is still of cash and the secondary of the plastic money. One of the good things about the announcement made by the government was that they are limiting the amount you can withdraw, limiting the cash you have in hand and thereby making you to use your credit and debit cards more often and causing that much needed behavioral change in all of us slowly and silently. This will surely make plastic money move to the primary position and cash to the secondary position.

The network: For the entire monetary system to become cashless, the network of complimentary and supplementary services need to be in place. Let us accept the fact that we are still a nation where few of the merchants either don’t have a facility of taking payments by cards or refuse to accept payments by cards even after having the necessary infrastructure in place for the Indian love of cash or charge use an additional fees for providing you the convenience of paying by card. We still have a lot of petty things we buy from petty shops like milk, flowers, vegetables etc where cash is still the mode of payment. We have a strong retail network and we are still not in a state where we buy things like milk from a supermarket and pay cashless. Merchants refuse cashless transactions primarily because they need cash for rotation, for buying goods and for other business transactions. We still have the sentiment of visible cash being the blessing of Goddess Lakshmi and the invisible cash doesn’t hold any value for us. Unless the network of major merchants are forced to move to cashless mode of transactions, the system around them will continue to be driven by cash. There are many government agencies as well which are still not matured to accept card based payments. This is a major prerequisite for a cashless economy along with a much stronger and faster settlement process.

The cashless apps: I am still not quite convinced on how well we are using the cashless apps like Paytm etc. I know for the fact that they have a large subscriber base, but do they really have the transaction volumes. I myself know many of them who registered on these apps just because they got some discount or other promo and used it once or twice. How many of the registered users actually got converted to regular customers and used such cashless apps repeatedly for every payment they could make through that is the question. The network of the cashless apps have the same problem as that we have for credit cards. There are a selective few merchants who are onboard with this mode of payment and hence cashless apps act as a secondary for credit cards interestingly. Even if many of the merchants are on boarded, the whole pain of both the parties having to transact through an app might be a deterrent. Options like contactless cards or even QR code based payments might need to be looked at.

Technological challenge: Let’s look at reasons why we love to carry cash even with our plastic money. The top reasons would surely be: The shop might have a credit card machine but most of the time it is not working or does not complete the transaction due a system or network glitch, There might not be an ATM where I go and hence let me carry cash, the transaction amounts would be petty and the shop might not accept cards for it, I don’t want to the pay the additional charge for using my card and the list goes on. Few of the people are still wary of using plastic money as they feel it is insecure and can be easily hacked into especially in the online world. For cashless apps, the main challenge would be to get the app work in the toughest of the network and power conditions and also the ease of use. If cashless apps don’t look convincing for anywhere anytime use, then it might still fail to become mainstream mode of payment across the nation. All these reasons conclude to the same point that our backend technological infrastructure needs to be available, reliable and secure for people to be least worried about the mode of payment and encourage cashless transactions.

The common man: The PMJDY scheme was easily the best nationwide scheme implemented as far as I know. Now every citizen has a bank account with an ATM card which has empowered every citizen with the basic necessity of a cashless economy. Although all of them have it, many of them do not know the utility of this and banks need to play a major role in educating every common man on the benefits of the ATM card with them and how they could use it for making transactions. Banks need to facilitate this fully and this will be the most critical step in getting the crucial mass on board the cashless economy. Getting them to use their cards in near term itself would be a big achievement, cashless apps might be a distant target.

The old-youngsters: It might be a lot more easier to bring in the Gen X and Gen Y on board with cashless transactions but we have a majority of the old-youngsters who trust the nation’s oldest bank only, rely on their pensions and use cash for most of their transactions. This is the generation that is still taking baby steps in adopting to technology, many of them still might not be using internet banking, they are still getting used to using smartphones and other electronic devices, they are still unsure of how to download and install an app (Unfortunately many of the greatest apps being built in the Indian startup ecosystem like Uber, Ola, BigBasket etc have high utility for the old-youngsters but are catering to the young-lazy-office goer crowd just because of this technological barrier) and are still scared of using their plastic money. Some of them might get convinced to move to cashless mode of transactions but majority of them will find their own reasons to avoid them and can be on boarded only in the form of compulsion where they are forced to use only cashless mode.

A cashless economy is going to bring in more transparency and ease of doing business. It might also bring more regular streams of incomes for many of the citizens due to the receivables financing based schemes that banks and other financial institutions can implement due to the increased use of plastic money. However, this would also need the same style of implementation like the Aadhaar and Bank linkage for LPG subsidy where over a short period of time every one was forced to take an Aadhaar card and a PMJDY bank account to avail the LPG subsidy and retain only the genuine connections. The same feeling of compulsion and urgency needs to be created to make every citizen embrace the cashless economy, however, the necessary system and infrastructure would be needed before that starts.

High Impact Presentations by Dale Carnegie Training (Review)

2016-11-13T12:36:00.000+05:30

The book How to Win Friends and Influence People introduced me to the legend of Dale Carnegie. I was fortunate enough to attend a second classroom training from Dale Carnegie India Training – this time on making High Impact Presentations. It was a two day program. Having attended many soft skills training in the last ten years, I was little skeptical on the benefits of attending it ; but I wasn’t disappointed. It was an engaging and revealing two days of interaction. I am sure each of the twenty participants had some good takeaways out of it. Since it was a company organized training, all of us knew each other, the challenges we may have etc.; that made me think if it was an open training with unknown fellow participants, the learning taken out may have been a bit better.

High Impact Presentations training by Dale Carnegie is a two day program, in my case there were two facilitators as well. Day 1 was concentrated more on ice breaking, setting up a baseline for each of to compare against, body language, importance of structure, and a bit on group presentations. Day 2 started building on the concepts of Day 1 and focused more on aspects like use of analogies, how to open and close, expressions, and finally doing a review presentation including all the things we learned. The uniqueness of this training was the number opportunities each of the participants got to present, and get it reviewed by both the facilitators and fellow participants.

In total, including group presentations, we would have made around five presentations over the two days, recorded them and got reviewed. Here is a quick takeaway notes from these two days. The fulcrum of the entire training was around three pillars — Structure, Content and Delivery. Focusing on each of these pillars is important. Getting each of these correct ensures a great delivery of the presentation. These may sound text-bookish; believe me, these when put to action during the two days were showing amazing improvements in the presentations and presenters we saw.

How to effectively plan your presentations?

Planning the presentations is as important as delivering the presentations. Before you even start to put together the presentations, one need to understand the audience, their level of understanding about the topic and the purpose of the presentation. For example, the way you structure the presentation will be entirely different if it is a motivational presentation as compared to a technical presentation. Another rule of thumb is to have few key takeaways and messages you want the audience to imbibe in. One of the important takeaways for me (which was re-iterated) is setting the agenda. Most of the effective presentations starts with setting the context, and setting the agenda and expectations in a black board. This not only gives the presenter a pathway; but also to establish a joint ownership of content with the audience. This also helps to keep interest levels and earn respect with the audience. From a delivery stand point of view, utilizing visual aids enhances the credibility of the presenter.

How to effectively structure your presentations?

This is an important section where I learnt a lot. Having an impactful opening is important for any good presentations. This can be done using analogies, asking questions, stating startling facts, compliments or dramatization. This is important to keep the interest level of audience intact as well as keep them engaged. While delivering the meat of the content, it’s always good to simplify things, use examples, and facts to simplify the message. Finally the closing should be as crisp as the opening. It should be simple yet powerful. It’s always good to close your presentation with a lead to action (for example asking for a follow up meeting, or ideas from audience on how they are going to implement the ideas or even asking volunteers to brief their learning). This goes back to the planning stage of understanding what’s the goal of the presentation – is it to persuade, is it inform or is it to share knowledge.

How to engage with the audience?

Preparation is only a part; delivery may be another…but engaging with the audience result in an effective presentation. This starts with building rapport with the audience before even starting the presentation, acknowledging knowledge and comments of audience and body language. Body language doesn’t end at the way you stand – it has a very important role in building an impression, enabling the audience to listen and use of expressions to assert the ideas. From a content perspective two things aid to engaging effectively with your audience – knowing thoroughly and beyond the scope of the presentation and being able to relate to audience, and simplify things depending on their receptiveness. Active listening is another important pillar to engage with audience. Finally, all presenters want the audience to take some action – be it apply whatever they learnt or purchase something. Dale Carnegie has put forth a ‘magic formula’ to help us achieve this. As per this, spend the final 90 seconds thrusting on the incident/experience/evidence for 80 seconds; 5 seconds on an action you want the audience to take and the last 5 seconds on emphasizing the positive benefit she can take out the action.

Let me close the post by mentioning about another key learning I had from the training on handling pressure situations or tough questions. If you are asked a tough question, it’s always better to take a pause, paraphrase the question asked taking out any negativity, acknowledge the question and respond from a positive angle. Here is a quick repository on various techniques to handle objections. I think one shortcoming I saw in the training was not having a focus on your weaknesses. This is more due to the fact that Dale Carnegie Training content believes in enhancing your strengths rather than your weaknesses. Overall, a very good training and I recommend it if you can afford to attend one!

Getting started with essential tools for your new blog! (Google Analytics, Search Console, GTM, etc.)

2016-09-18T00:02:00.000+05:30

Analytics - its everything when it comes to Digital Marketing! If you are setting up a blog or a website, it is important that you set up the analytics and measurement foundation effectively. Usually, Google Analytics and Search Console belong to this arsenal. Considering, we may have to implement multiple tracking tags for various objectives like analytics, A/B testing, advertising and more; its recommended to use a tag manager. Google Tag Manager is a free offering from Google that helps you meet this objective. In this blog post, let's see how to get these three implemented for your new WordPress site!

Implementing Google Tag Manager

If you don't have a Google account, create one as the first step
Login to Tag Manager UI and create a new account
Accept the Terms and Conditions (after reading it of course ;))
You will be shown a GTM container JavaScript tag. This the core and only tag you need to install in your website. In the case of implementing this for a WordPress site, we need to enable one more plugin. Download and install the plugin - Insert Headers and Footers. This plugin enables you to append the tags. You may want to remove the iframe from the code since it's not valid in HTML5 (for more details, read Simo Ahava's blog post)

Implementing Google Analytics using Google Tag Manager

Login to Google Analytics and create a new property and get the tracking ID. All you require now is the ID like UA-XXXX-YY
Go back to Google Tag Manager and select Add New Tag and choose Universal Analytics tag. Since we are implementing the site side analytics tool, the event to be selected is page view. No additional custom or advanced settings are required since we are implementing a basic GA tag. We will later look into installing additional GA tags when we track events or transactions.
Choose the Trigger as All Pages (Page View)

Publish the tag
Visit your website
Go to Google Analytics account and Real Time section. If you are able to see at least one visitor shown, Congratulations! Your set up of Google Analytics using Google Tag Manager for a WordPress site is complete.

Claiming ownership in Google Search Console

Search Console is the offering from Google to understand how fairly your website is doing in search results. Claiming ownership in Search Console is easy and straightforward.

Login to Search Console and add a new property
If you were following along this blog post, unfortunately there are only two methods that will work to claim your ownership -- verifying the website using your domain name provider or adding an HTML tag. Verifying via the domain name provide is the automatic and easiest method. If you choose the second one, go-to the Insert Headers and Footers plugin and add the meta tag provided by Search Console.

Claiming Ownership in Bing Webmaster Tool

Bing Webmaster Tool is similar to Search Console giving insights into how your website is doing in Bing Search results. Since these two are the market leaders, they continue to add/revamp features provided by these tools. It's always a good idea to get a non-Google view of your website's performance.

Login to Bing Webmaster Tool
Click Add Your Site
Since posting an XML may not be possible directly for a WordPress site, we need to follow either of the following two options -- add a meta tag to header or add CNAME to DNS. If you opt the first option, follow the same step as we did for implementing Tag Manager. In case you choose to add the CNAME, follow your domain registrar's requirements. Most of the cases, it would just required to add a CNAME value with host as the alphanumeric provided by Bing Webmasters tool and pointed to verify.bing.com
Once verified, you will be able to see the dashboard in Bing Webmasters; don't worry if you don't see any data yet. It will show up eventually.

Congratulations! You are now up with three important foundations pillars in digital analytics!

Note 1: There is a plugin available for WordPress (https://wordpress.org/plugins/duracelltomi-google-tag-manager/) created by Duracell Tomi to easily implement Google Tag Manager; seems to handle some of the challenges mentioned above; but I haven't used it.

Note 2: You can also use easy to implement plugins like Yoast to connect the website with webmaster tools

Driverless Cars – The Imaginable future

2016-09-16T10:05:00.000+05:30

Guest Blog - Prashanth Thimmavajjala

Prashanth is an MBA graduate from IIM Bangalore, currently working in the testing domain and is still trying for an opportunity to crack into the management world from the technology world. He has published multiple papers for PMI conferences and other forums.

The news that caught my interest this week was about Uber launching its driverless car service in the US on an experimental basis. What initially started off as a technological experiment by some companies like Google has now become close to reality with multiple companies putting their hat into the ring. What started to intrigue me was: is driverless car a mere technological innovation to showcase technology or is there some business value to it. On some deep thoughts, I could think of a few possible business cases where driverless cars might be helpful in the near future.

Aggregation with Marketing

Imagine you are looking up for an offer in your favorite store through Google which is tracking your click-through, page visits etc in the background and you find an interesting offer for you which you plan to avail. The store website might ask you a few basic details to confirm if you are their regular customer and then being their privileged customer, they offer to send you a driverless car for picking you up and dropping you back after your shopping is done based on your current GPS location using Google maps. The store might tie up with Google for offering this service but this might very well be the next step in customer delight and premium customer service

Healthcare

Though the wearables and fitness bands are more a fashion statement now with a few serious users, wearables have a huge potential in the world of healthcare. Imagine people with critical illness and ailments wearing a band that keeps track of their vital medical statistics and sends the data to a central server. Upon observing any alarming condition of the patient based on some preset thresholds, signals are sent to the nearest driverless car to the patient based on their current GPS location and the driverless car is able to pick the patient and reach the nearest hospital based on Google’s maps technology. This could be a boon to patient who stay alone, travel alone or stay far from a medical facility during medical emergencies where they might not be able to call up an ambulance.

Transportation

Google Now and Siri are the high-tech personal assistants, they can tell you when you are running late for a train you have booked, what routes you need to take etc. Now imagine this gets integrated with Google’s driverless cars. Imagine you are travelling by a train and Google is able to track your train’s arrival time at your destination and send a driverless car to pick you up and drop you at your residence based on your saved GPS locations in Google maps. Maybe the driverless car might come to pick you up when you are getting late for a meeting at office and take you through the shortest path to your office from home.

Lot of valuable data

Imagine if you use the driverless car service for a few times, Google will have data regarding the places you frequently visit like restaurants, offices, localities, malls etc and also the data on the localities you frequently pass by and with all this data Google will be able to provide highly personalized advertisements based fully on your current and future interests making the ads more productive for Google instead of bombarding irrelevant ads to you.

Creating the personal experience

Driverless cars could provide a more personal experience than a normal taxi. Google already knows your favorite music and shows your watch from your YouTube account data, they could use this and offer to play your favorite music while you are travelling or play your favorite show in the screen within the car if the journey is longer. Google could use lot of other data they have been tracking based on your searches and actions to create a more personalized experience.

All these might seem far from reality, while we are still questioning on whether driverless cars can be a reality in crowded places, these are a few of those many things that might unleash the potential of multiple technologies coming together to complement each other. There could be many more that I might not have thought of, you are welcome to add them to the list

Ads of Flipkart Assured against Amazon Prime – how do they stack up?

2016-09-12T14:06:00.000+05:30

The Trio in Indian eCommerce market - Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal have been trying hard to not only keep its market share, but also get an additional pie out of it. In fact, the Indian companies, Flipkart and Snapdeal have been struggling to keep their game up against the giant, Amazon. In a market that goes behind discounts and offers, these eCommerce giants are trying to vow prospective customers with an additional offering - premium services that offers various additional features such as faster delivery, guaranteed quality and access to exclusive deals.

If we rewind a bit, before these premium services, it was all about the prompt delivery promise (with Flipkart Advantage and Amazon Fulfilled). Later it was all about the quality and no-fake products value propositions. In July 2016, Flipkart revamped its Advantage offering and changed to Flipkart Assured (F Assured) program. As per a recent article in The Economic Times, this is expected to help the company compete against Amazon on quality assurance and customer service front (specifically the Amazon Prime offering).As per this policy, Flipkart undertakes six quality checks, faster delivery of products and simplified return policies. Flipkart is also investing in promoting the change heavily in owned, earned and paid media.

Let's first review quickly, the Flipkart Assured video commercial they have put up in YouTube. There are actually two - and both have created its own controversy. In both the ads, Flipkart has brought back Kids at center stage.

What's the ad all about?

The ad starts with a perceived gentlemen having a neck collar ordering a pair of shoes using Flipkart Assured. Introduction of the feature in the beginning itself creates a curiosity of the offering. Two watchmen asks how can one be safe shopping online. The dialogue around perceived risks in online shopping and the answer of protagonist that only one check - F Assured is required reinforces the USP of the offering.

Its followed by a humorous scene of a dog peeing on one of the watchman's shoes and the other asking if he also need a new pair. The commercial ends with another re-iteration of the message of what F Assured is all about. As per the above Economic Times article, Flipkart is targeting youth who haven't really started to try out online shopping with F Assured. However I don't feel that has come out well in the commercial. I think, the audience targeted is more of a middle aged group hesitant to buy online. Also, the ad fails to highlight other benefits such as faster delivery (which is in fact included in a follow up 10 sec ad). Overall the tone of the ad is humorous in nature. The controversy was around Nepalis/Gurkhas be stereotyped as watchmen.

What is the Value Proposition?

Let's look at the value proposition of the offering now. In India, it was Flipkart who first introduced premium services in e-tailing with Flipkart First. I think it didn't sail through well because of the cost conscious Indian customers.

However, this year with its success in the West and a possible inclusion of Videos in the offering; Amazon beefed up the competition with its introduction of Amazon Prime. Flipkart First, when compared to Amazon Prime was still falling short on many counts (for example Flipkart is not claiming a 100% early access to daily deals for its members).

I think, now with the introduction of Flipkart Assured; it has just created another confusion around what the actual offering is and what it is competing with - is it against Amazon Prime or is it Amazon Fulfilled or Flipkart Advantage or Flipkart First itself. From its features, F Assured seems to be more inline with Amazon Fulfilled rather than Prime. Also, while both Amazon and Flipkart has its own ambiguities in its terms and conditions; Amazon Prime seems to be more appealing (especially when they include Amazon Videos as well). Here is a quick comparison between the two. Interestingly, as a catch-up exercise, Snapdeal also has come up with its own version called Snapdeal Gold!. This looks similar to Flipkart Assured in terms of the features included in the offering. Here is a quick comparison between various offerings.

Flipkart Assured	Flipkart First	Amazon Prime	Snapdeal Gold
Free Service and on selected products 6 Quality Checks to ensure product quality Fast & Free Shipping (free delivery and within 2-4 days if purchase amount is above 500/-)	Paid Service (500/- per year) Discounted/Free/Faster delivery Early access to selected deals Better customer support	Paid service (499/- per year) and applicable on selected products Early access (30 minutes) to lightning/daily deals at Amazon Fast & Free Shipping	Free service and on selected products Quality assurance Free next day delivery in certain cities Better return policies

Flipkart Assured badge may have been a relevant differentiator during the initial days; but considering they have established their brand for credibility, I am pessimistic about its value add. Also the target audience it is trying to reach will be more careful (by reviewing the seller quality, brand of the product etc.) than just go by the F Assured badge. The media budget could have been utilized more to promote Flipkart First as opposed to Flipkart Assured (similar to what Amazon is doing for Prime as opposed to Amazon Fulfillment)

What do you think about these offering; do you think it will fly in a market like India?
Is it just another marketing gimmick or necessity to keep up the game...?

Book Review - Are You Ready to Succeed? by Prof. Srikumar Rao

2016-06-11T22:47:00.000+05:30

The book, Are You Ready to Succeed? by Prof. Srikumar Rao was introduced during one of the personal development electives at IIM Bangalore. However I got the chance to read it completely only now. This is a light as well as a heavy read depending on what your intentions are. Professor has included lot of exercises;more like self reflections in each chapter. So if you are doing every exercise seriously, the book is a heavy one requiring your sincere efforts and time.

I would consider the book to be a self mastery book focusing both on personal and professional lives. The author has taken lot of ideas, and examples from eastern philosophy. Two key ideas that I took from this book are mental models and mental chatters.

Mental Models - Put it simply, its nothing but how you formulate realities. For example, your may have built a mental model that unless you are in the US, no one will consider you successful; so even if you are in a good job, happy life and have all the possession one can imagine, you will still consider yourselves a failure. What the author argues is that - this is just one of the realities that you have accepted; there could be other realities as well, for example being able to follow your passion also means being successful. Professor Rao urges the readers to try and find out alternate realities that helps to succeed instead of following a downward spiral path.

Mental Chatters - Mental chatter is the continuous self talk that you may have. Its built and continued based on the mental model you have built. For example, let's continue the example of above mental model; your mental chatter may be - oh, Tom went to the US for his higher studies; he wasn't even close to my caliber at school; yet he has gone. I am un lucky; I am of no use...I wont succeed etc. Professor Rao argues that mental chatters are real and it strengthens the mental model you are following.

The book revolves mainly around these two concepts and dives deep into how to build a better life, relationship in personal, professional and societal lives. Few of Professor Rao's lectures are available in the net and these discusses about the ideas mentioned in his book.

TED Talk : Plug into your hard-wired happiness

Google Talks (Leading@Google)

Powerful Lessons from Great Masters - How to Build a Life, and Not Just a Career

Overall a good book and powerful concepts!

Learning MBA Courses for Free! Part I

2016-05-26T20:35:00.000+05:30

Irrespective of whether you are an MBA or a B School student or a B School aspirant or someone interested in learning more about business/management, there are a plenty of resources available on the web. For a person who likes to listen rather than read through, there are many video courses/lectures as well. In the next few posts, I will try to put together an MBA curriculum completely based on free video courses (either MOOC or pre-recorded) covering both core courses and electives. Today, let's start with core courses (MBA first year curriculum). An outline can be pulled from any B School website. In this post, I will specifically concentrate on Finance and accounting courses.

Financial Accounting

Financial Accounting is a core course required for all the MBA students in their first year irrespective of the Business School they study in. Financial Accounting can be considered one of the foundation stones of any Finance course you take later. This is also one of the 'most feared' courses :) There are many free online courses or MOOCs on this topic. Here are three of them --

Introduction to Financial Accounting from Wharton is an introductory course offered within the Coursera platform. Overall, a great introductory course with a case based approach. I would consider this to be a crash course giving the high level ideas in Financial Accounting. If you are more interested in the topic, Wharton also offers a course on advanced topics as well as another course specifically on accounting analytics

Introduction to Accounting - I from IIM Bangalore is an introductory course offered in EDX platform and a favorite of mine since he was a Professor during my stint at IIMB :) I would consider this to be slightly theoretical in nature. But if you are interested in accounting from an Indian/Asian perspective; this is a great course. It is expected that IIMB will be rolling out second part of the course later in the year. I am sure, it will take the route of advanced courses from Wharton.

Introduction to Financial Accounting from Brigham Young University -- I haven't taken this course. But this seems to be a good one too with a complete coverage of topics in Financial Accounting.

Management Accounting

Management Accounting or Managerial Accounting is the other side of accounting coin. Very important for manufacturing industry, this aims to provide better information for managers in implementing an organization's objectives in the most cost effective way. This provides an insider's view; while financial accounting is meant for an outsider's view.

Management & Cost Accounting Modules - The YouTube play list from Rutgers Accounting Web is a great resource to start with. It is a collection of over 400 short videos on this topic by Prof. Noel Cooperburg. He takes a strategic approach to managerial accounting rather than an accounting/numeric based approach.

Managerial Accounting - IIT Bombay is an NPTEL course from IIT Bombay taught by Prof. Varadraj Bapat. Slightly theoretical, it gives a good introduction to accounting as well a deeper view into cost aspects.

Finally, there is a set of two courses in Coursera from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I haven't gone through this and is yet to start. First one, Cost Behaviors, Systems, and Analysis is expected to provide the introduction and Tools for Facilitating and Guiding Business Decisions deals with advanced topics.

Corporate Finance

Corporate Finance is the next foundation stone of all Finance related topic an MBA student might take up. Often a good learning of corporate finance is a must to even start with advanced topics. If you look for a Professor in Corporate Finance, the most famous one in the web is Prof. Aswath Damodaran of Stern School of Business. All his corporate finance courses in video format is available for free and this is perhaps the best source for learning Corporate Finance (http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/)

Corporate Finance @ Coursera -- Two courses are available in Coursera - one from Wharton School of Business (Introduction to Corporate Finance) and another from IESE Business School (Corporate Finance Essentials)

Financial Markets and Institutions

In some MBA curriculum, I have seen a core course on Financial Markets. It overlaps with Corporate Finance in some instances. In my case, it was an elective offered. Though 5 years old, I think Financial Markets by Prof. Robert J. Shiller of Yale University is still the most comprehensive course on this subject. A Coursera offering is also available which I believe may be a shortened version. Another personal choice is the course on Introduction to Banking & Financial Markets by Prof. PC Narayan of IIM Bangalore. I was fortunate enough to attend his classes while at IIMB. Finally there is a course by Prof. Andrew Lo (Financial Theory I ; an old, but good one)

In the following posts, I will cover other core courses and electives in a typical MBA curriculum.

Five TED Talks for all MBAs and MBA aspirants!

2016-05-16T09:00:00.000+05:30

TED has been a great platform to listen to some of the greatest minds and ideas. TED is so vast today that its literally impossible to watch all the videos from TED and TEDx. I thought to share with you five TED talks every B School aspirant, or MBA student must watch. As said, these are the ones I picked from the talks I watched during B School, before and after. I am sure there are many more that you can share with the readers.

How great leaders inspire action by Simon Sinek

MBA is all about leadership these days. Every curiculum and Business school try to impart on its students theories of leadership, and groom leaders. In this talk, Simon Sinek discusses about inspiring employees or followers to take action.Contrary to explain what we do - how we do and why why do (in that order), Simon argues that it should be always in the reverse order; and that's what makes an organization different. Making understand the employees, and customers the purpose of the firm makes the difference. He makes his points taking examples of Apple, comparing Wright Brothers with Samuel Pierpont Langley, TiVO and more.

How I harnessed the wind by William Kamkwamba

There are many entrepreneurship and inspiration related talks in TED. But this is one of my favorites. This shows how an idea and passion can really change people's lives. This a talk which will make you think how small ideas, the learning from your education can give back to society. Its a short talk in which he explains how he made a windmill for his village from scrap items and reading from a public library. Another talk that will poke you is How I started a sanitary napkin revolution! By Arunachalam Muruganantham.

Lead like the great conductors by Itay Talgam

It's a talk by leadership; its a talk about having a process. It's a talk about how to motivate and give a sense of ownership to employees instead of micro management. He talks the approach of showing sub videos of various orchestra conductors, their styles and what leadership learning we can take. I really liked this video because of then engaging factor and the topics/ideas he subtly put forth.

How to pitch to a VC by David S. Rose

A typical MBA type talk; discussing about Venture Capitalist presentation.He talks about what to say, how to say, how to create the presentation. Also he goes into depth of what VCs expect in these presentations.

How data will transform business by Philip Evans

If you are an MBA aspirant, this talk gives a feel of how the lectures on Economis and Strategy will be - with all the jargons, frameworks and high level pictures. In this talk, Philip Evans, a consultant at BCG put forth the idea of how data is transforming the thinking of business strategy. He touches on how fall in transaction costs, technology/internet reduces or kills intermediaries. It asks some great poking questions about how technology is forcing business models to evolve.

Book Review - Lateral Leadership by Roger Fisher and Alan Sharp

2016-05-05T18:27:00.000+05:30

Lateral Leadership - Getting it done when you are not the boss is a leadership book written by Roger Fisher and Alan Sharp. To be honest, it was not a pleasant read because of the writing style of authors. This is in spite of the fact that it's a short book and Viva Books printed it in good quality paper even if it was a low priced edition :) I expected the book to be something catering to professionals in roles without having the authority ( like a Product Manager or Business Analyst). But the book tries to be lot of things.

The authors take a two fold approach - first on improving the personal skills and later on to use them to improve collaboration and lead teams. At certain points, I felt it's more a personal skills training book than one on team building or leadership; may be it is due to the fact that it's all interlinked. The book is written in the three parts. First one introduces the topic of lateral leadership and what the authors mean by the term. The second part dives deep into the components of lateral leadership - how to first develop the personal skills required and then to pass on them to your team. Last part is a conclusive discussion on how to keep improving yourself with these learning.

The crux of the book is that we should understand the the real purpose of why we are doing something , make the team understand and own it; once this is achieved, cultivate a culture in yourselves and within the team to come up with thoughts, actions and ownership in achieving the goals. The authors also cautions about 'paralysis with analysis' often seen in discussions and also how to keep the team members engaged. Finally, there is a decent discussion on how to give and receive feedback as well.

Five things you will learn from reading this book are -

1. How to develop and create a purpose - be it for yourselves, organization or a team undertaking

2. How to set goals effectively

3. How to harness collaboration and engagement in a team

4. How to provide and receive feed backs

5. Few frameworks, thought process aids guiding your journey in becoming a better leader and team player

Two things I wish the authors did a better job are

1. A better writing style

2. Cut short on unnecessary theory since it's meant more for a professional audience than academia.

Overall, just a decent book to read.

Understanding Google RankBrain

2016-04-01T14:16:00.000+05:30

A discussion on Google algorithms never get to and end :) We have been discussing about Google and search engine algorithms in general now in a series of posts. While Accelerated Mobile Pages got traction in the last few months; there was also another interesting update from Google on another algorithm component called RankBrain. RankBrain is not an algorithm update in itself; its more a component of a wider algorithm that we discussed earlier - Understanding Google Hummingbird.

What is RankBrain?

We know that Hummingbird algorithm aims to change Google from a search query/result engine to a knowledge engine. Rank Brain could be considered as the major part of the algorithm that helps Google to achieve its goal. Rank Brain is the machine learning/artificial intelligence component embedded to capture the semantics better and further perhaps ingest information into features like Google Knowledge Graph. I think this is one component, which SEOs won't be able to go behind directly (except utilizing things like schemas and mark ups)

RankBrain - One of the most important ranking signal

RankBrain is considered to be among the top three ranking signals Google use. There are supposed to be more than 200 ranking signals used by Google. Rank Brain's machine learning code is expected to connect between ambiguous and vaguely connected queries to provide meaningful results/answers. Over-time it is expected to build a memory of its learning within the algorithm. Thus it is expected to understand the intend behind a search query.

Examples of RankBrain

While a clear and evident example of how RankBrain is impacting search queries; its believed is addressing vague long tail queries. One evident way to see the benefit of this is in usage of various semantic combinations of words in a query. See below for an example -

So essentially Rank Brain is just another factor to make searches and search results smarter! If you would like to get a more in-depth understanding of what rank brain is and what it isn't; do check out Moz's article here.

Here are the other blog posts in which we have discussed search engine ranking algorithms and updates -

Understanding Google Penguin updates

Understanding Google Panda algorithm updates

A note on Google Pigeon algorithms

Google Knowledge Graph

Comparing Bing Snapshot with Google Knowledge Graph

Google Hummingbird update and the opening up of entity search

Mobile Friendliness Algorithm updates