2 Min SKSM

 "Loyalty" is such fuzzy word that everybody wants it but nobody knows the definition. After reading and introspection, I could conclude that when a person is presented with options, loyalty acts as a moral compass. Everyone takes decision based on logic and magic. Probably this magic is "Loyalty". This magic may come from a product, employer or your life partner! This magic is known as Brand.  In Economics, one of my favorite graph was indifference curve i.e. Consumer can select various quantity of Good A or Good B to get same level of satisfaction. Similar relationship can be explained  between level of Capital (Technology) and Labor to get constant level of output. So, I am coining a word iso-guilt curve. i.e. One balances between logic and magic to decide on options with same level of guilt.  In current capitalism era, the brand loyalty has become questionable. E.g. based on price discount (logic) one may select Flipkart or Amazon, Ola or Uber, Swiggy or Zomato.

What will it take to be successful in digitally transforming a company? Agile/ Lean management? No, it's Cheetah's philosophy and then Lean & Agile.   The main objective of digital transformation is to question legacy assumptions e.g. "do we need processes for expense claim at all?" rather "can process cost be decreased by 30%". The later is an example of incremental improvement and falls under Lean philosophy. Agile comes in to the picture when the final solution is being implemented by IT team.  My prof Mr. Saral M  once said "most of businesses fall in two categories: Elephant and Cheetah". Elephants are gigantic, conservative, cost conscious and utilization driven business houses. Cheetahs are flexible, change driven,  margin & customer conscious business houses.  Cheetah will have surplus of capacity (human/ physical resources) to capture new opportunities and to leverage sudden changes. Elephant will have resources 90+%  utilized and

Scope creep is seriously injurious to health of engineers, project managers and in the end customers. Apple phone is highly user friendly because the designer knew when to stop. Product exists because it does not exist outside of it. And this is the Yin-Yang moment.  You are defined by what you are not...Light exists because there is darkness...One is true because others are zeroes... Yang is there because yin exists outside of it... You have something everywhere. What defines an object is drawing a line stating outside of this is Nothing. That is why you have to reject hypothesis to prove something. As my professor once said "Strategy is the art of closing doors". He did not say opening doors but closing doors. The same philosophy applies to scope statement as well. Scope statement should clearly mention what not to do.  "We will implement mobile application to do xyz. However, iOS development is excluded in this phase." Now you decide which statement has given mor

It is really easy to misconstrue Strength with Fame. Even Management can forget the true Strength in the period of success and noise. One or the other day, we consultants, must have used SWOT or GE-McKinsey Matrix, plotted so called "Strength" and proposed strategy. But how easy was it to find out "Strength" of a company?  Case study: Kodak.  There is no doubt anyone, during 90's, would have opined Kodak's strength was in imaging and printing. Then camera went digital and then disappeared in smart phones. Suddenly noise during Kodak's heyday dropped its decibel. All strategic framework failed since Kodak was "Disrupted", it became "Myopic".  In my opinion, it forgot what its real strength was. It was never imaging/ printing but its knowledge in specialty chemical. It knew the best chemical composition to capture the "Kodak moment". Never the less, in the moment of silence, it found thyself and continued its journey. Today, d

Continuing my previous blog  FASCINATION AND TRAP OF AI, ML, BLOCKCHAIN , this lure is not limited to management only. Industry, as well, such as Agriculture has seen much pompous joy towards these technologies and talking "Agriculture 4.0" day in and out. More and more entrepreneurs are creating startups, impressions and scaling up horizontally across globes and then vanishing serially without making a scratch on surface. Industry has a prestigious name for this post as well "Serial Entrepreneur". Because the problem statement here is not to create "Painkillers" but to use new-age technologies and possibly make some "Vitamins" as by-products.  Case in point: One of the Indian Company used Image processing, AI and ML to predict possible pest attack. When I asked what is the efficacy, the ground staff said it's accuracy is 50-50. Well my coin can do a better job than this because it costs not more than 1 Rs! How and when of Industry Revolution

 Any consultant who says "Future is in AI, Ml or Blockchain", he/she has to be looked upon with jaundiced eye.  These new-age technologies have become such buzzwords that have created cognitive traps for executives. If the company wants to be disruptive, executives are to be seen as visionary, they have to invest in them, don't they! What is AI and ML? When it's difficult to predict from data using rule based logic i.e. "if...then", we can think of deploying Machine Learning which can generalize predictive capability to solve more and more similar problems repeatedly. If there are no generalization then it is probably pure statistics and normal software. If the entire system can run autonomously and reaches a level where intervention of human intelligence is no more required, it is called AI. A good principle to assess if ML can be used is, can a human predict from your stored data. In the end output of system cannot have information that are not available i

Once my father asked "why do we learn science?"  I said "to control Nature." He smiled and said "Don't be so arrogant. It is to understand Nature."  I under-graduated from a university which has a motto "तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय" meaning "from darkness to light". Then I joined another university for graduation which has a motto विद्या विनियोगाद्विकास! meaning "Development through the distribution or application of knowledge." These noble ideologies shaped my 'conservative' mind frame.  Then I see this advertisement which is wrong in so many ways.  Are money and social recognition new yardstick of success? Why are kids/ parents to be informed about EARLY SUCCESS of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates in ad campaigns? Why do kid and codes have to be published on Facebook and YouTube pages? Is it to boost parent's ego, increase peer pressure or confirm social standards? Is this ethical marketing practice at all?

"We are still coding, you will get UAT build after Sprint 5 i.e. after 6 months" "We understand this is not so user friendly. But this is as per Business requirement. We cant change it" "The UI is not intuitive. But UAT is not a phase where we can change Business requirement." Many customers may have heard software vendors passing these comments in review discussion for a project which was supposed to be completed with AGILE model. Beware, they are all waterfall vendors mis-branding themselves as Agile.  Agile is not set of tools or techniques but a philosophy. I call it AGILE-ISM: more C ollaboration, more C ommunication, open to more C hanges to provide the most  C ustomer centric product. Scrum, Sprints, Retros, Kanban - all are just tools and techniques. Project has to be released sooner so that customer can start using it. Changes have to accepted so that project is not obsolete. What is agreed upon between customer and vendor is not list of features

COVID has pushed many businesses to adopt digital marketing. Many of them probably did so not because of its merit but peer pressure or lack of option. And the initial cost to start digital marketing is so less that it does not require good discussion/ debate/ thinking. And this is where problem lies. Conventional marketeer and management, possibly,never understood and accepted it wholeheartedly. And questions like "what is ROI", "Is it really effective", "can this replace offline activities" always linger around in the back of everyone's mind. The irony is that Digital Marketing gives so much data - views, impressions, geography, engagements, demographics etc that were unthinkable for offline campaigns still it is always seen from jaundiced eyes.  These questions are pertinent but difficult to answer if it's haphazardly implemented and in most of the cases it is.  Like any other marketing campaigns, customer has to go through the decision making s

Once upon a time, there were Cheetah, Deer and Lion in a jungle. Deer was a fast runner (60 kmph), Lion was faster (70 kmph) but Cheetah was the fastest (100 kmph). Whenever Cheetah wanted to hunt Deer, there was competition from Lion. Cheeta started healthy diets to run faster. But competition was still on. Then Cheetah got a n idea and started feeding Deer instead and gave all support to make them healthy. As Deer became fitter, it started running faster and reached 80 kmph speed. Thereon Cheetah lived happily forever.   Why did Cheetah do something so counter intuitive? Assess the new competition landscape and you will have the answer.  This story is inspired by a tale told by my Prof Saral M at IIM, Ahmadabad. If a company can change the consumer behavior, it can create a new blue field. In the era of quality driven market, Zara changed consumer behavior and leaned them towards a fashion statement - Anything 3 months old is out of fashion. This created a new market for  Zara whose

When the entire India was figuring out how to fight COVID, Prime Minister mobilized mass movement appealing for light off for 9 mins at 9:00 PM on 5th April 2020. Half of junta started debating that this would collapse grid and the PM has endangered lives for sake of publicity. You could hear cacophony from "Lutyen" news channels. Another half was like this was a master stroke by PM in levitating hope and enthusiasm among people during this grim period. Post this eventful night, you could hear euphoria and "told you so" debates from "Bhakt" news channels. But none covered the topic with data and irony was that this was a complete scientific question.  After 2012 the worst blackout, Indian power utilities took many corrective measures to keep grid security intact: more flexible power plants, reserve capacities, pump storage capacities etc.   On 5th April, the max instantaneous frequency was 50.259 Hz and min was 49.708 Hz. These were well within the safe ra

There are many SMEs who may want to track their field force but such application development is not so pocket friendly. One such company reached out to me and I took it as a hobby project. To my surprise, it came out so nicely that kept me thinking how powerful Goggle services are.  Customer required  Configurability in drafting information the company will like to capture during field activities Geo tagging field activities  Dashboard and analytics Solution: Google form was at the center in creating the solution. Google form integrated with Google Script was able to Geocode and reverse geocode. This link was then opened from native Android App using webview. Pre-filled form gave convenience to ground users of not filling redundant info every time e.g. employee details. Google form was then integrated with Sheet and then Map to create complete GIS based dashboard. Google Sheet charts, maps were then integrated with Google site to create a dashboard for manager.  Google search ensured t

For sometime, the thought troubled me. Electric Vehicles get the juice from power grid so are they really eco-friendly or its just a marketing stunt. Lets analyze: We need 20KWh at the production site to charge EVs for 100 km run. A coal based thermal plant (in India) emits 980 grams of CO2 per 1 kWh as per CEA  considering Gross Calorific Value and Station Heat Rate. So 100 KM by EV emits 19.4 KG of CO2. And the same 100 m run by a Petrol hatchback will emit 13.2 KG ! Oh my my!!! However, Indian grid does not provide power only from coal based thermal plant. It's still 80:20. Simple algebra will tell us we need 68% power from thermal and remaining from renewable to match the emission level of Petrol Hatchback.  But renewable need balancing plants to mitigate variability in grid. Normally gas based plants are used for this purpose. Thankfully gas only emits 50% of CO2 than that of coal based plants. So we need renewable plants towards 60% to make EVs "ECO-FRIENDLY". Long

 Perhaps "Marketing" was known to human from the day 0. But the word never existed in Webster dictionary before 1910 coinciding with that time Industry Revolution 2.0. During this period production increased many fold with introduction of assembly line and so constraint shifted from supply to demand. So need of Marketing as a separate subject was heightened.  Marketing concept evolved since then  Production concept (focus on reducing cost) Product concept (focus on product quality) Selling concept (push through commercials) Marketing concept (focus on customer's need & want) Social concept (focus on social benefits) The image speaks volumes about then sentiment. Now the same Ford site allows customer to build its own car! In Industry Revolution 4.0 - Internet and IoT age, marketing has evolved to "Democratic concept" where customer regulates, executes and judges. Where everything is decided by likes, dislikes, ratings - sentiments. Today India is not the lar