Innovation
Jeff Bezos was interviewed by BusinessWeek for their story on Innovation. I can’t be more of a fan of Jeff Bezos. I loved reading his story a few years ago, as having gone from a quirky hedge fund manager to being the founder of Amazon. He is truly one of the sharpest minds out there having lived through the dotcom bust riding a pure -to use outdated dotcom verbiage- “clicks and mortar” play.
BW asked a very poignant question and I quote “Q: Every company claims to be customer-focused. Why do you think so few are able to pull it off?”. Jeff’s answer just blew me away. He says “Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is “why should we do that—we don’t have any skills in that area.”
I thought about how it goes down at my place of work and how it probably is at your jobs as well. Or maybe at your own businesses. Almost everyone’s instinctive reaction to an innovative, out-of-the-box-idea is “But we can’t do that” or “It is not part of our model” or “You’re crazy!”. Recently, I had the honor of earning the indignation of my colleagues and a boss when I suggested tagging leads to a salesperson for life – i.e., if salesperson A uses salesperson B’s lead, then A should be given a (small) referral fee for the life of the deal that B put together with that lead. You should have seen the huffs and guffaws that went around the room and I was quickly pounced on by everyone. Needless to say, the internal confusion about compensation for sharing leads remains unresolved and is going to result in a lot of disastrous meetings and confusion with a last minute solution cobbled together and put in place. The idea was to move away from an ownership model, let salespersons relax about cross-sells and focus on increasing their business.
Jeff is not suggesting that if you run a painting company to start selling flowers. No way. The point of focus in his words are “A much more stable strategy is to start with “what do my customers need?”. He says Amazon’s Kindle is a great example. He doesn’t say what prompted him to develop this new gadget but one can imagine that it might have stemmed from delivery delays that buyers might have experienced on Amazon. If you were savvy enough to buy all your books from Amazon, then you probably want to get to the book faster. And so Kindle was born.
This was the most insightful questions for me from the interview… it clearly validated my way of thinking, thank God! One of the ideas I picked up from the jokers at SearchMyCampus.com is to offer a service if there is a critical mass of folks asking for it. By that I mean, if you’re in the painting business and a certain number of your clients (say 2 out of 10) ask for spackling services then that is something you might want to review. 1 out of 10 might be a random request but 2 out of 10 signals the start of a pattern. 3 out of 10 and you should start hiring the right folks and buying the equipment and by 4 out of 10, you should be ready to do your first spackle job.
This is great for me personally as well because I clearly recognize that I do not possess all types of skills. I am good in some and suck at others. But instead of being skill based (can you make presentations? Can you train your team? Can you manage people? etc.) Jeff now makes it easy for the million of us by suggesting retaining focus on needs. If you are not able to manage people, then you can find someone. Ditto for all other skills. Seems like the winner is the person who keeps his/her ears open to client needs and orchestrates the execution to provide solutions to them. Simple? 
Applying American Ideas to Indian Situations Experiment
This is really simple. It just does not work.
By the way, if you’re looking for any ideas with serious dotbomb potential, look at SearchMyCampus.com. How would I know? Well, I’ve had a dotbomb of my own back in the day, albeit wiping only a small portion of my family’s savings. Here are some snippets that might help:
Hello world! Our First Attempt at Blogging
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008Brief recap: SearchMyCampus as you can see in the About Us section, is an online campus noticeboard for students across various campuses. The idea for this just happened to hit Peyush (founder and CEO) while he was wandering the streets of Montreal, Canada looking for a place to stay during his time at university (a couple of nights sleeping on a park bench with only some stray dogs for company does that to a guy).
We’re getting good feedback (coz, well, all said and done, it is a pretty brilliant idea) and some criticism too which we’re trying to incorporate in our future development
The Program Manager/CEO’s first post is just precious, as is the title for his post – “Share it and I bet you will find it!”.
Here is another quote:
It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from. (Wasn’t there a Backstreet Boys song that went something like that? Hmm) We’re pretty flexible about timings and hours too. What we’re looking for are people who are just as passionate about the site as we are, and committed to taking it to the next level.
The ultimate objective of SearchMyCampus.com is to enable students in colleges to mutually fulfill their needs, without the need for intermediaries.
(well, isn’t the site an intermediary in itself? And is this a business or a charity for local students, who live with their parents – yes, that’s how it is in India)
Despite your growing cynicism from reading this post, you should know that the intentions of the CEO are pure. However, just because one slept on a parkbench in cold Canada because one couldn’t quickly find a place to live (this is rhetoric because NO Canadian university worth its salt would allow an international student in harm’s way), it does not mean that the same problem exists in India.
One problem that is directly, immediately and financially worth addressing for students in India, is test preparation. Competition is rife in this space but therein lies the opportunity, right? If so many players are in the market, then it could mean that the opportunity is huge. It could also mean, and this is especially true of India where customer service concepts don’t exist (at least for Indians serving Indians) that customer needs are not being met satisfactorily, and hence you can set out to develop a better service. Think about it Peyush. “Build it and they will come” is a fool’s dream. Of course, I have been dead wrong in the past.
Blue Ocean Strategy Update
A lot of you have been searching for Blue Ocean, so I wanted to publish an update to my previous post. I came across this interesting link of another blogger who has made a career out of this, a la “Balanced Scorecard”.
City Level Experiment
One-hit wonder Bhatia is also on the board of Nanocity and is a founder of this idea. It is set near Delhi (a la Gurgaon). From http://www.nanocity.in/ -
Nanocity spans 11138 acres of flatland located just beyond
the foothills of the Himalayas. It is less than 25 kms east of
Chandigarh and just over 200 kms north of Delhi. Two
seasonal rivers form the eastern and western borders of the
city and two streams trickle within its boundaries. It is well
connected by National highway- 73 ( NH-73 ) and State
highway-1 ( SW-1). It is a public/private partnership between
Sabeer Bhatia Group and the Haryana State Government.
Does Bhatia really think that KP Singh of DLF is going to let him get away with this ambitious project? More importantly, with the millions of square feet in today’s burgeoning “Software IT Parks” business in India, is there not enough space that we now need a whole CITY?
What do you think?
The Bet Against Singularity
Ray Kurzweil lives in Massachusetts and has been a prolific inventor since he was in his mother’s womb. He has also written a ton of books – here is his Wikipedia entry for more information.
He is also the main proponent of Singularity. WIRED has a cool article about him in their latest issue, billing him as a Futurist who is doing everything he can to live long enough to witness this event. Briefly, it is the point in time predicted by Kurzweil where when machines become conscious or become aware and overtake human intelligence. Before you start guffawing, remember that he has been at the cutting edge of technology for many years and has been almost always ahead of his time.
Kurzweil’s toenail is smarter than me. But then when I read that he and his research partner Dr. Terry Grossman whom he met in 1999 have “exchanged thousands of emails, sharing speculations about which cutting-edge discoveries could be safely tried” (WIRED article), and also that “The doctor charges $6,000 per appointment”, I couldn’t help wondering what will happen to the future of Singularity, if I placed and win won a bet that Kurzweil will be dead in 60 years or less? You see, this obsession with immortality or doing stuff in the afterlife is traceable to the Egyptians. They buried their Pharaohs with artifacts to be used in the afterlife (which still lie lie still unused after 1000s of years!), so this idea of wanting to either live forever or for at least way beyond general life expectations, is very, very old.
But can such stupendous claims, backed no less by the most complex and probably the most accurate of equations generated by one of the smartest men on Earth, be dissolved into oblivion, by the simplest of representations of information – a binary choice … a bet?
Kurzweil pops a LOT of pills (”He takes 180 to 210 vitamin and mineral supplements a day, so many that he doesn’t have time to organize them all himself”), which for a renowned scientist like him seems like a very stupid naive approach because after all, these are pills from today’s time, created by today’s unethically scary pharmaceutical industry, for treating yesterday’s problems from yesterday. I think if old age doesn’t kill him eventually, then the chemicals will probably get to him soon enough. He also “frequently bicycles through the Boston suburbs” – seems like a fairly safe activity but you can be hit by a car anytime and as the traffic is crazy in the city.
The “Singularity” movement hinges on Kurzweil’s ability to live very long. Guys like Matt Philips, 32, “who became independently wealthy when Yahoo bought the Internet advertising company where he worked for four years” and are willing to pay Dr. Grossman (remember, he is Kurweil’s Singularity partner) $6,000 an hour purely based on Kurzweil’s word, means I smell opportunity.
I’ll bet that Kurzweil (born 1948) will die sometime in the next 60 years. He is already around 60 years of age, and people living up past 100 is not uncommon (there are around 75,000 100+ year olds in the US). I think he will probably die due to a major illness concocted by these toxic pills, or by riding around in Boston, or by being shot by a crazy-eyed Matt Phillips (JUST KIDDING!). Dr. Grossman states that “The normal human lifespan is about 125 years” – ancient Indian texts suggest 4 stages of life each spanning 25 years. So do I believe 1000s of years of knowledge or a $6,000/hour doctor with a deeply vested interest in propagating Singularity till Kurzweil lives?
Can the great mathematical and scientific Kurweil and his million books on Singularity be brought down by an scientific simpleton like me?
Microfinance
Microfinacing is a great way for people like me who don’t have a lot of money, to spend small amounts and help people be productive. Kiva.org is a great example and CNN has a nice story on it. While lifting someone out of poverty is a great thing, my primary motive to help would be to enable some be productive and entrepreneurial as I have a need for both myself.
On the website, there is a way to promote entrepreneurs thru a link that can be emailed around or posted. I figured this person, Chingul Fathulloeva of Yavan who has raised only 5% of the total money she needs to “purchase supplies for her work (beads, thread and material)” could be a start.
Feel free to reach out to Kiva directly and here is the CNN article.
Good Boss, Bad Boss
If you’re a regular reader, you already know I don’t believe all people are intrinsically bad. Of course, some are born that way (dictators) and some become that way (tyrants) but most people, in my opinion, cannot be classified either this way or that way. Everyone has a bit of bad and good in them.
CNN has a great article written by Martha Beck of Oprah.com. Here is a snapshot of the good boss/bad boss qualities; I agree with all except one:
Bad-boss self-concept: As a leader, I’ll be a higher-up.
Good-boss self-concept: As a leader, I’ll have to go lower down.
Bad-boss target setting: Now that I’m the boss, I give orders to others.
Good-boss target setting: Now that I’m the boss, I bring order to what others do.
Bad-boss position on feedback: Now everyone must tell me when I’m right.
Good-boss position on feedback: Now everyone must tell me when I’m wrong.
Bad-boss protection strategy: As a boss, I’ll be protected from taking blame.
Good-boss protection strategy: As a boss, I’ll protect others by taking blame.
Bad-boss problem solving: Being the boss means I can avoid problems.
Good-boss problem solving: Being the boss means I must seek out problems.
I think people can get carried away with the point highlighted in red; even good people can get lynched from time to time for various reasons. I think moderation will be important because it depends on the situation when you hear a resounding NO. I also think that you MUST acknowledge someone (including your boss) when they are right. I’d do that more often than saying no.
Lao-tzu said it best, hundreds of years ago – “If you want to govern the people, you must place yourself below them”. The boss who starts wiggling his/her finger at the underlings is no longer objective. The article said it best – “Good-boss target setting: Now that I’m the boss, I bring order to what others do”. That is such a cool, zen-like idea because no matter what position you are in, you need to make someone else’s day go by smoothly. I don’t care if you’re in sales, operations or HR or in a workshop cutting wood. Pick any occupation.
Bringing order to others’ chaos is a beautiful and philosophical way of looking at what you do, even if you hate it.
Update: just noticed a great blog that also commented.
Gmail and Google Pranks
Oh well ..
“Google does April Fools’: ‘Custom time’ and a Mars trip”
Wonder how many people fell for these funny pranks!
Google April Fools Joke
Are you one (of possibly millions) that fell for this trick? It is April Fools Day people, come on! Google prank
But of course, you might think this is a prank too, but sorry, apparently they’re dead serious about it.
What else are they going to do with that pile of cash and two kids in-charge?
