Job Application

Late last afternoon, I came to know from normally reliable sources that there is a job opening at one of the buildings in South Bombay. The building is a very famous one, though for the purposes of keeping things quiet, I shall only give two clues to the curious reader:

1. the name has two words
2. the first word is the old name of the city which today goes by the label 'Mumbai'

No, no more clues! however many times you ask me, that's it!! Now scram!!!

The job itself was quite a senior post in a reasonably large company. Again, for the extremely curious, the company name two words, the first being of 4 letters, signifying 'goodbye' in common slang. I SHALL NOT give you any clues about the second word.

The benefits of the job are very attractive:

• the incumbent will be supervised by an old man, who used to do this job before he retired. However, he's so enamoured of the job that he is quite unwilling and unable to give it up. So he'd love to continue doing it - very much like Sir Alex Ferguson trying to run Man Utd, even when David Moyes was the manager. This would suit me down to the ground - let the old man do the work, while I can have a good time, collect the handsome pay, ride the equally handsome chauffeured vehicle that, I hope, comes with the job, not to mention the other perks. (I mean the vehicle is handsome, not the chauffeur, I hasten to add!) 
• The money, as I've mentioned above, is generous. I believe that a largish, if not exactly palatial, house goes with it, although other sources tell me that I'm expected to have my own house. I'm good with that - my palatial house in Santacruz East should suffice for my humble wants. 
• all expenses are covered, I believe. The only costs that I shall have to bear is breakfast at home, which on normal days runs to a banana, a couple of paavs with butter, milk and wheatflakes and Darjeeling tea; that doesn't burn a big whole in my currently meagre household budget. Lunch is at the office, cooked by chefs from the hotel owned by the company and served by staff from the same hotel. Every evening, dinners are fixed by the secretarial staff with the best and the brightest in the land - and naturally, the company pays for all the food and drinks. I don't know whether the office has a bar with complimentary booze, but I think I can sneak in a half bottle of Old Monk from time to time. 
• Monthly overseas trips are written into the job contract, and all expenses paid! Think of that! The wife will go berserk with the shopping in Viramgam West (aka Birmingham) and at all the Patel shops in Flushing Meadow. We can stay at the fanciest of hotels, eat the most expensive of foods, drink the really vintage wines and the really socko single malts - all on the house, matey! I'll have to check if the wife's tickets, etc are on the house as well; if not, she'll just have to stay and go to work like she's been doing for years. 

Sounds like a really good deal. So, I've sent in my CV and recommendations from my various IIM Calcutta alumni friends, as well as a draft contract, just to demonstrate my honest and straightforward approach. The key clauses in the contract are:

• after one year in the job, I shall step down and permit the company's spin doctors to spin it the way the want. If they want me to be sacked, so be it - I'm not one to deny the small pleasures of an old man. 
• I shall not go to the Low Court or any other court of any description whatsoever, and I shall not give any media interviews. 
• However, my job contract must specify that I'm permitted to write a conspiracy theory novel to surpass all other such novels, about my climb and fall in the said corporate house, after a decent period of waiting - let's say, 6 months after my successor has gotten into office. This is non-negotiable. 

I understand from my highly reliable sources that currently the company has cobbled together a committee called The Five Wise Men, aka The Five Finder Outers (for which moniker they may or may not be paying royalty to Enid Blyton), who are tasked with filling in the vacancy before April Fool's Day, 2017. 

I believe my CV and draft contract will suit the Five Whatevers down to the ground, and I'm convinced I'll get the job. I can't think of anybody who's been so quick off the mark in sending in the application - that alone shows my initiative, energy, eagerness, ability, etc. etc. for the job. 

And I am willing to negotiate - if the Five Thingys don't want to give me the Rolls, I shall not call them cheapskates; I'll be quite happy to settle for an El Cheapo Merc or Beamer. I'm not choosy. 

Businesses and threats - parallels with animal behaviour

You're driving down an unlit road on a moonlit night. Suddenly, a fox jumps out and is caught in the beams of your headlights. What happens? Typically, the animal just freezes for a few seconds, then it starts running along the road just a bit ahead of you. Once it figures that it can't outrun your car, it jumps out of the road, and presumably breathes a sigh of relief at its escape from the strange monster.

Sometimes companies behave in the same way while facing a totally unforeseen crisis. First comes the freeze, while the magnitude of the crisis and estimation of disaster and damage takes place, while the crisis looms even closer. While this is happening, things go on as usual, perhaps in the hope that the crisis will pass, it isn't a real threat to business, there'll be a solution round the corner, etc.

An good illustration is the Blackberry story. In 2009, it was the second most popular phone after Nokia (and that's another story) and now it's consigned to history. The hyperlinked article mentions that Blackberry launched a modern touchscreen phone in 2010, three years after the iPhone came on the market. Death freeze!

What do we do when we're about to be hit? We make ourselves as small as possible so that the area of impact is lessened - the passenger manual on any aircraft advises us adopt the brace position when an aircraft is required to make an emergency landing on land or on water, making us as small as possible in the seat.

A company 'sizes down' when it's survival is threatened. Not only does it shed people; it sheds activities that are non-essential to its survival. It sells of non-core businesses, it keeps only its cash-cows. If product and/or process innovations are key in its business, it will run a R&D effort as best as possible - in any case, most of its best talent will find greener pastures.

I'm curious to find other such examples of parallel patterns of behaviour, and not just in response to threats, so right now, Google search beckons. 

Hierarchy of needs for a business - some thoughts

Milton Friedman famously said, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” 

Leaving aside those businesses which do not engage in open and free competition and do indulge in deception and/or fraud, and who prefer to play outside the rules of the game, this quote has created somewhat of a philosophical divide between two types of businesses - those who believe that their only responsibility is towards its shareholders, and those who believe that their responsibilities extend towards a larger public of stakeholders as well. 

A good Indian example of the latter philosophy is the Tata Group, which publicly states that: "At the Tata group we are committed to improving the quality of life of the communities we serve. We do this by striving for leadership and global competitiveness in the business sectors in which we operate. Our practice of returning to society what we earn evokes trust among consumers, employees, shareholders and the community. We are committed to protecting this heritage of leadership with trust through the manner in which we conduct our business."

Does this kind of bipolarity reflect in the hierarchy of needs proposed in my last post? It can be argued that at the basic level of need - resources for survival - the most important stakeholder is the shareholders. All the other stakeholders - employees, vendors, customers, etc - are all via media to ensure survival. The importance of the community and society are not of a high order, since most surpluses generated need, necessarily, to be routed to the survival and health of the business. 

However, at the same time, satisfying the needs of employees, vendors, and customers are paramount to the survival, and most of such needs are legally protected. Hence, even at this basis level, a business has to operate with a stakeholder approach. 

In the context of the discussions on CSR over the last decade and a half, it can be seen that it is only from the second level of need - resources for growth - that CSR becomes meaningful and practicable. It is only from this stage onward that shareholders are likely to agree to forego some significant surplus to be given back to society, instead of being paid out as dividend. 

Of course, there are and will always be businesses, who play within the rules of the game as they interpret them. Some of their actions are quite harmful for their reputations - as this article and this one about Walmart tend to show. 

Fundamentally, however, it is likely that the owners of a business come with a belief in one of the two contending philosophies, and once the business is stable and growing, stakeholders other than the shareholders become important determinants on strategies and actions. 

Is there a Maslow's hierarchy of needs for a business?

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is one of the fundamental precepts in psychology and is ubiquitous in the world of business, marketing, human resource management, and elsewhere. We use it everyday of our lives and the pyramid below needs no explanation.

[Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow]

If we examine a business over a period of time, one can make the case that there exists a similar hierarchy of needs applicable to a business. So, let's build such a hierarchy for a business.

At the bottom of the pyramid comes the need for survival - threshold level resources that ensures that the company keeps going. Since survival is not enough for most businesses, and the need to grow is paramount for the owners and other stakeholders, the second level of the hierarchy could be 'growth'.

After a while, a business seeks recognition and a feeling of belongingness in the area of business in which it operates. This is natural; when a company is born, the market and its competitors look at it with some degree of suspicion about its longevity, unless it brings some highly differentiated product and/or technology offering which carries the threat of upsetting the hitherto comfortable apple cart of the business domain. After some years of consistent growth and success, the business is now an accepted member of the space, and it seeks 'membership' of the business world. Ad and marketing communication agencies want to win awards; companies want membership of their respective trade associations, and to attend association meetings and network with their peers.

The next tier is respect. Businesses want to earn respect and want the world to show this respect. It can take various forms - talented people want to work for it; customers want to work with it; company leaders are voted to leadership positions in trade associations; the company is expected to set the tone in conversations about the industry, the market and other such matters. CSR starts to become an important strategy at this stage.

At the summit of the hierarchy is the tier I've called 'statesmanship'. The company has the resources to do things not directly or even indirectly affecting its state of health. CSR activities gather higher momentum and cover a larger canvas of operations. Company leaders start working with governments on issues which do not limited to its areas of businesses; the business commits resources to enhance skills and knowledge not purely for its own consumption.

Hence, the skeletal hierarchy could be depicted as below:



I've called it 'skeletal' since right now, it's just an idea - interesting, but untested, unproven, and it might not even be new!

I'd love to have readers send their opinions, constructive or destructive, examples of such descriptions from published sources, etc; I'd really love to learn in this area.

You must buy the Tata Tiago - Lio says so. Or else!

Imagine this about 3 decades ago - a typical ad agency brainstorming session. It is eleven o'clock at night, and outside it's raining like it only can in the Bombay monsoons. The meeting room is filled with leftovers of a samosa, Maggi noodles dinner and somewhat bedraggled account exec and creative types who'll get passed over by any fastidious cat. The ashtrays are filled to overflowing. The glasses and the bottle of Old Monk are all empty. Nobody has any money to go any buy another OM, and in any case the booze shops are all closed. And worst of all, we're supposed to present ads to the Bossman tomorrow morning, and there's nothing to show - nothing at all worth a d***.

That's when our Creative Director would open up and speak those golden words of wisdom which have resounded in the offices of ad agencies since the days of Pompeii: "Let's put a really pretty bimbo in the ad, and the client will love it. Make sure that she shows a lot of thorax, chest and midriff and we'll get approval."

Sex sells. Right.

Decades have passed, and the bright minds of Indian advertising have found something else that sells even better.

Celebrities.

I can imagine the conversation happening in the ad agency at another eleven o'clock at night brainstorm meeting. Of course, no ciggies, no Old Monk in the conference room. Now the CD says, "Stick in some celebrity mugshot in there, and we'll get approval."

In a seminar some months ago, a highly respected Professor of Marketing in one of the top business schools in the US gently hinted at his sense of surprise at the popularity of celebrity advertising in India; in his view, no other market uses celebrity advertising as much as India. One can easily believe it - we need Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar, and other assorted film, TV and sports stars to sell us anything from flipflops to payment banks to travel booking sites and shopping sites, etc.

Is it because Indian consumers really believe that celebrity endorsement means that the product is a better, more reliable product? That Salman Khan actually uses Bahamas flipflops? Maybe they do - going through a few hundred assignments from MBA students over the years have convinced me that the writers of such assignments really believe that celebrities bring credibility.

So, all the things we were taught about the vampire effect, and matching brand values with those of the celebrity are perhaps old hat. Perhaps, sticking a celebrity into the ad is a hidden confession of the lack of ability to think of a strong creative idea, and hence an easy escape route.

So, the idea is that when the finest footballer in the world, Lionel Messi, exhorts us to rush out and shell out Rs 4 lakhs for the Tata Tiago, we should be doing just that. Maybe the Tata guys are right - according to this, Tata Motors received over 1 lakh enquiries for new Tiago by mid April. Sales were perhaps not as spectacular, if this is to be believed, but it's early days yet.

Tata Motors receives over 1 lakh enquiries for new Tiago

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/51877959.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Tata Motors receives over 1 lakh enquiries for new Tiago

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/51877959.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Or is it just fanciful thinking? Car buyers in the Tiago category may not care at all about Lio or any other celebrity endorsement, but are more concerned over mundane matters like "Kitne deti hai?"

I've tried to get stats from my friends in market research about the role that celebrity endorsement plays in advertising and the specific areas of influencing consumer behaviour, but no success - their data is of course for privileged access only. Perhaps a reader of this post may wish to point me to some data which is in the public domain and does address this question.

A question of ROI

Makar Sankranti 2016 is just done and dusted. Pongal and Bihu is over. And soon we can look forward with eager anticipation to being regaled by a genre of stories which hit our media every spring and summer - large-scale cheating in school and college exams. For those with short memories, here's one such happening from March 2015.

For those who believe that this is a peculiarly Indian behavioural trait, or at best a third-world phenomenon, please be prepared to be corrected. It's pretty common in Stanford too. Yep, that's right - Stanford. Here's proof that I'm not hallucinating - check this out. And no, it isn't limited to Stanford - it appears to be pretty widespread - see here.

Since cheating appears to be a universal, and universally appealing phenomenon, my curiosity was aroused and I did some Google research as to why cheating is so widespread. I finally came to the conclusion that it's all a question of ROI - return on investment - and hence purely economic.

Let me explain. A child needs to pass in school in order to get into college. A college degree is essential in order to get a job. A job is essential for livelihood, marriage, etc. etc. Hence the economic connection is clearly demonstrated. QED.

Economics also tells us that risk and return are directly proportional - the higher the reward, the higher is the willingness and propensity to take risks. However, time has shown us that at the highest levels of reward, there is precious little risk. We just need to look at what happened to Wall Street and global banks in the 2007/8 meltdown. They burnt up billions of dollars, bringing global economics to the brink of collapse through what can only be described as chicanery and fraud. But they got saved by taxpayers' money. And not a single executive went to jail for even a single day.

There's a lesson here for all of us - if you must cheat, cheat big, really big. Then the government will step in and save you. Amen.

Branding in the digital age - the merits of riding a tiger

First off, let me confess that I'm 64 and, therefore, a real real late-comer into the digital age. Thanks to pressure from my students, my son and his peers, and the countless nephews and nieces that I'm blessed with, I decided to jump into the deep end of the digital age and got myself accounts in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, the last of which I've since discontinued.

What took me by surprise was not the behaviour that I noticed on such "social" media spaces, but in the e-commerce and m-commerce spaces. I would have sworn that we Indians would never buy clothes and shoes without going through our 'touch-feel-see' and 'trial' routines - but thankfully I had not taken any vows about it, since I would have to eat crow, and large quantities of that indigestible bird.

On closer study over the last few years, I noticed some significant changes in the way consumers, particularly young consumers in India, interact with offerings, messages and brands. This has significant impact in the way marketers need to go about creating strategies and tactical plans in order to bring their brands emotionally and physically closer to their consumers.

A New Paradigm

Changes we've seen can perhaps define a new paradigm in consumer behaviour, but let's go ahead without caveat:

1. The consumer today has far more choices than she had in the past. That's of course a given, but it also means that power is now more assuredly in the hands of the people, and not in the hands of the manufacturers and/or channels. 
2. The consumer today can and does bite back, and hard. Had a bad holiday experience? You will go onto FB and create a shindig. The product you bought off Amazon is not up to your expectations? Sure you'll yell and scream - and you'll get heard too. 
3. Consumers are learning faster than ever, and much of their learnings come from other consumers. So, you don't just have to satisfy one consumer but a whole community. Word-of-mouth has never been so powerful.
4. The consumer's attention span has become shorter in most cases. If you want to tell her something, make it quick, fast and straight. But, you can't be boring - you must engage, entertain, excite her at the same time. "Buy me because I last longer" is still a good message, but now you must prove it in a fun way. Exhortation has to give way to excitement. 
5. At the same time, the consumer is prepared to spend more time in search, evaluation, and post-purchase validation. In an article entitled "Branding in the Digital Age: You’re Spending Your Money in All the Wrong Places", the author writes "In the June 2009 issue of McKinsey Quarterly, my colleague David Court and three coauthors introduced a more nuanced view of how consumers engage with brands: the “consumer decision journey” (CDJ)...Their research revealed that far from systematically narrowing their choices, today’s consumers take a much more iterative and less reductive journey of four stages: consider, evaluate, buy, and enjoy, advocate, bond." An interesting sidelight was that consumers today spend a lot more time in the post-purchase stage than they did earlier. 
6. Consumers' relationships with brands can fracture quicker than ever, but if cemented strongly can last for much longer - in other words, the marketer can move the consumer to such a stage of satisfaction that she can become an advocate and brand ambassador. Here, I don't mean 'likes' in an FB page, which is a meaningless word in that context and totally without validation. What I do mean are consumer feedback without incentives, or sometimes incentivised post facto. 

Riding the Tiger

So where does that leave the marketer? Does she have to unlearn everything that she's acquired over the years? No, not really - but she must be smarter at picking up nuances from the consumer universe she's dealing with. Let's look at a few guidelines which may be useful:

1. The first fundamental rule of brand management has not changed - if your proposition is not addressing a need or a want, go back and start all over again.
2. The second fundamental rule remains the same - be differentiated and be relevant to the consumer's needs or wants.
3. Don't think 'product', think 'augmented' product, and better still, think 'possible' product. Consumers are already doing so, and so are your smarter competitors. 
4. Mass media is not dead, yet. As long as mass markets exist, the validity of mass media will remain. However, how a marketer needs to carefully blend and manage how mass media communication (one-way) meshes in with the two-way communication in other consumer engagement spaces, particularly when many consumers are engaging with each other over a single brand acquisition issue - think of it as a multi-way conversation in a multi-verse. 
5. Time has shortened. The consumer decides faster and adopts or jettisons brands faster. The marketer must deal with faster decision times and ride this tiger in order to build a successful brand today. 
6. The consumer is teacher, professor and mentor - always and forever. Alexander Pope's dictum "The proper study of mankind is man" has never been more true.

The good old-fashioned virtues of solid product performance, excellent after-marketing, caring for the consumer and showing that you care, building trust and confidence - these are still highly valuable today, perhaps even more so, in a highly fragmented market space of multiple choices. I venture to suggest that these virtues are permanently desirable for a brand.

The marketer who works towards building these virtues will build very strong brands indeed.

Society for the Care of Political Leaders who've been whipped at the Hustings

I saw this picture recently in a newspaper, and my heart bled.

For a minute I thought that these were refugees running away from the depredations of those evil Bokacho.... Haramza... militants in Nigeria. I was reaching for my wallet for a hefty 10 buck contribution towards their board and lodge, when I looked more closer at the picture.

And my heart bled even more. Here they were, the erstwhile political leaders of our Nation, who'd been kicked out of their cushy jobs by the populace.

And these are not the only ones - the list is pretty long: Kapil Sibal, Salman Khurshid, Arvind Kejriwal, Farooq Abdullah, Arun Jaitley, Milind Deora, Gurudas Kamath, Priya Dutt, Praful Patel, Sushil Kumar Shinde, Raj Babbar, to name just a few.

No more privileges, no more power - what will they do for their daily bread, since they've stopped earning theirs by honest toil many decades ago? Nobody's going to give them any bribe or hafta any more. No Arnab Goswami will call them to the studio and shout at them "the nation wants to know...." Death, where is thy sting? is the question that most of these leaders are asking themselves. 

I believe that what our country needs is a NGO focused on the care of politicians who've been busted by their electorate. Three square meals totalling 50 bucks a day, unless the fellow stuffing his face happens to be the sardar fellow called Ahluwalia in a blue turban, for whom the ceiling is fixed at 28 bucks a day less 10% TDS and 12.36% Service Tax.

So, here I am, setting up this NGO -  Society for the Care of whipped Political Leaders (aka SCPL - Scalpel - which is a nice mnemonic).

Of course, not all of them will need the services of my NGO. This gentleman thought he'd get a solid job doing what he's good at - this is a service which will never go out of fashion.

But he found there's a smarter way - he quarreled with the judge at the court, and became a guest of the nation for a couple of weeks. The food is better, the housing is superior - all modern conveniences are available, including HDTV, etc. And of course, the neighbours are all upper-class, moneyed types. Great place for networking for future prosperity.

And there's Arun Jaitley, who's got friends in high places. He's already got a job, with the promise of being sneaked into the Lok Sabha in a perfectly legal way, and his appointment will be regularised post facto.

But there will be many takers for my little charity. And come the state elections, there will be many more. I wonder where I'll house them.

I'm looking for like-minded and generous souls who can contribute towards this NGO - we'll have entertainment evenings when the recipients of our charity can reminisce about the great work they've done for our country, how the bureacrats used to quake in their chappals, and how rotten the current government is. I hope that some of their colleagues who've won at the polls will come in and hobnob with the inmates and talk of the ballot boxes they've stuffed together in their callow youth.

We are choosy, though. Not any old leaders whose rear has been kicked can come in - we reserve our charity for the deserving rich and criminal. It will be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for Mani Shankar Aiyar to enter the kingdom of Scalpel.

The Case of the Rubber Swords

My contacts in China inform me that Indian political parties have placed large orders for rubber swords, with immediate deliveries. There's no mystery in this - leaders of various political parties who've performed abysmally in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections will fall on their swords, and then hope to bounce back.

Some leaders have taken 'responsibility' for the disastrous performance of their parties and resigned/threatened/promised to resign, and two have actually done so. Imagine their plight if they discover that the swords they are prepared to fall on actually do have sharp edges, and can eviscerate them and end their political careers.

Tarun Gogoi, the CM of Assam, has promised to resign within a week, beginning May 16th. The poor fellow needs good secretarial help - obviously his current staff are not capable of preparing a proper resignation letter for the boss to sign. There is every reason to believe that he is waiting for his rubber sword to fall on. If anybody would like to volunteer for the task of writing a good resignation letter, please get in touch with me - I have an inside line to Shri Gogoi.

Stalin resigned, but then bounced back. He must have got his rubber sword express delivered - he must have ordered wooden swords from amazon.com, though there is a rubber knife available here.

Nitish Kumar, the Bihar CM, has resigned, but is waiting for someone to take out his rubber sword from his dhoti. God forbid if his followers take him at his word, and replace the weapon with one with edges.

The Maharashtra CM is waiting for his bosses in Delhi to send him a sword to fall on. He is a worried man - he has inside info that the bosses have ordered a proper katana, and not a rubber one. I am told that he's ordered a steel body armour which he'll wear when he's told to fall on his sword.

Since Sonia Gandhi and her son have both taken responsibility for the debacle of the Congress Party, there is a strong expectation that they'll also fall on swords. I understand that various flunkies of the 'firstest' family of India are trying out various swords on which mother and son can fall, and then resurrect themselves on demand from said flunkies in the party. I have it from reliable sources that the reason why Rahul Gandhi had gone AWOL from the farewell bash for the exiting PM was not because he wanted to insult Dr MMS, but he wanted to personally try out various swords from a wide variety of soft materials. In an unpublished interview with a very senior correspondent, who shall remain nameless, Rahul said that he wanted to ensure that his mom and he had the softest landing possible - he didn't trust any of his party members, and did not want a Swordgate after the new Government came into power.

And no, the very senior correspondent is NOT the one who screams about the Nation Wanting to Know.

Shameless plug for Mountain of the Moon - my translation of Chander Pahar

The book is now available as ebooks, here:

• for Kindle, at Amazon - here
• for Android, at Google Play - here 
• and at Flipkart - here 

Hope you buy the book, and hope you enjoy reading it.
 

Teaching the girl child

Isn't this just wonderful? Got this some time ago from a friend - and I look at it regularly. Now you know why the status of women in the cowbelt (not that it is much different elsewhere) is what it is. Now you know why there will be many more Nirbhayas before women in our country get to equality with our men.

Now you know why deifying Indian women as Kali, Durga, Shakti, Bhavani, Saraswati, et al are great ways to hide the truth from them. Now you know why Ram will eat kheer for decades, while Sita is told to work, Geeta is told to bring food for dad, and Meena is told to help mother. Now you know why our education perpetuates slavery of women in our land.

Poor economics made simple?

A friend sent me a note about a teacher's experiment in the class, and the comments at the end of the news item. Unfortunately, I can't find the link to the news item - if anybody would care to let me know, I will update this post accordingly.



The end comments are:
"1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!
5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation."

I find this quite interesting for a number of reasons. It appears that the point under discussion in the class was redistribution of income, and taxation and 'welfare' spending as strategies to reduce the wealth gap between the rich and the poor. This is, of course, my hypothesis - I can't find the original news item, and can't vouchsafe that I am correct.

The first observation is quite correct. Legislation by itself cannot solve anything; this needs to be backed up by the will to implement and full implementation. We, in India, are more than familiar with both the lack of will and lack of implementation to argue with this. Even High Court judgements and directives don't get acted upon for years. We know this.

The second observation is interesting. There are people who 'receive' without working for - if I have enough investments, I will receive without working. That's a consummation devoutly to be wished by a lot of people - either I have worked for this in the past, or my forefathers did and I inherited enough wealth not to work any more. Does it mean that the means to acquisition of such wealth deprived someone else? If all businesses were built by robber barons, this would be a correct conclusion. But most are built by pretty normal ordinary people from ordinary backgrounds who build up wealth for the future - without depriving someone else either in the past, or the present or the future. So, how does this second conclusion make sense?

The third observation is pretty obvious, isn't it? The Government owns nothing - it gives out only what it takes.

The fourth observation is curious - is this a statement written by one of the Presidential candidates of the Republican Party in the US? Is this a justification of the 1% in the 99% vs 1% debate in the West?

The fifth observation is quite convincing to me - the statements are indeed written by said Presidential candidate or candidates. In reality, do these other halves really exist? If so, where?

If any reader would care to throw light on my dilemma, I shall be really grateful. 

Do consumers really really need loyalty programmes?

A few days ago, my wife and I counted the number of loyalty cards we have acquired over the years. Don't ask why we decided to spend our time doing this - male readers who are married will understand that there are certain things we men do because it's ours not to reason why. 

We came up with 42 cards - I repeat, 42 cards - all of them valid and current. We did a quick count of the cards that had been offered to us which we did not accept, and we came to the conclusion that we would have had a full deck of 52 cards - we could have played bridge with these cards, though only 'no trumps' contracts. 

This set me thinking about how these cards do, or do not, influence our purchase behaviour of the brands represented. The conclusion I have reached varies from 'not much' to 'not at all.' 

Consider the following example. We fly about 12 to 15 round trips a year, almost of them domestic. We have four airline cards. At one time, before the days of low-cost airlines, we used to regularly check points, redeem them for free tickets, upgrades, etc. Now, our airline ticket purchase behaviour seems to fall into three groups: 

• trips undertaken as somebody's guest
• trips undertaken on behalf of my employer
• trips for which we pay for our tickets 

In the first case, my experience is that the hosts ask me for my preferences in terms of time slot/s, and sometimes, and increasingly rarely, the preferred airlines brand. The brand purchase decisions are taken in most cases by the hosts. My airline cards do not influence such decisions. 

In the second case, my employer, like most businesses in India, allows the employee to choose the preferred time slot/s, and the employer chooses the lowest cost option. Once again, my airline cards lie unused. 

In the third case, our brand decisions are influenced by factors such as price and time slot (when traveling on holidays, our time is more flexible, and we normally prefer to fly during offpeak hours) - these lead to a short list of brands; previous experience with these brands determine the brand choice. 

The cards remain in the wallet, sulking since they are useless. So much so that we don't how many points have been accumulated in these cards, and frankly we don't care either. 

Consider another example. We have six cards from four of the largest departmental store chain brands. Why my wife has two cards each for two brands, she has no idea; perhaps momentary forgetfulness is a possible explanation. Thinking about our usage behaviour of these brands and in this sector overall, we came up with the following: 

• do we shop exclusively in these four brands only? The answer is no - we shop elsewhere and pretty frequently too.
• most of our shopping seem to take place (going back over the years) during sales, which are pretty frequent. Like Mumbai local trains, if you miss one, the next one will arrive in three minutes.
• do we use any brand among these four based on the number of points that we have accumulated in the respective card? The answer is again no. We don't carry the cards; if asked, we identify ourselves with our phone number (the customer ID); if not asked, we normally think of this after the purchase. We think of points redemption only during the sales - this reduces the cash outflow even further.
• the reasons for choosing which brand to use depends on four factors - the quality of the merchandise, the width and depth of merchandise, prices, and customer service experiences. 

The loyalty cards of these brands also sulk in the wallet, cheek by jowl with their brothers and sisters from the airlines. 

These are just the experiences of my wife and I, hence purely anecdotal. I checked out with a few of my friends and their wives - their anecdotes are virtually the same. If such behaviour is representative of a significant part of the consumer universe, the following questions arise: 

• there could be three reasons for running a loyalty programme - the programme is a motivator; the programme is a hygiene factor; the programme does not influence brand choice, hence it is an expensive irrelevance. Which loyalty programmes fall into which category?
• since all consumers love the words 'free' or 'sale', there is the possibility that a large proportion of the turnover of a departmental store brand is during those sale periods. How important is its loyalty programme during these times, in switching members of its loyalty programme over from competition, and conversely, in ensuring that the members spend most of their budget in its stores before they go to competitions' stores?
• Do consumers prefer immediate gratification in terms of price discounts and other things, or postponed (perhaps higher) gratification?
• If a brand stopped its loyalty programme, what would it lose? In case the loss is significant, can it be argued that the brand building was inadequate since the brand in itself did not have strong 'pull' in the marketplace? Was the loyalty programme a crutch being used to 'build' the brand? 

I look forward to comments and healthy argument from readers.

IR gone AWOL from HR

Two recent articles should go a long way in provoking a debate about how large organisations deal with their employees, particularly those who are disgruntled.

Mr V S Mahesh, in "The Maruti strike & an old story from the Tata Group" quotes JRD Tata - "One lesson I have learnt through 50 years of working with people is that there are no union problems…only management problems.” This is a telling remark; there are two others in the same article:

• "There appears to be an extreme paucity of good HR professionals who can balance the soft and hard aspects of people management. I believe the primary cause for this is the sort of HR-related education offered in our management schools and executive development programmes."
• "For decades, our management cadres have been fed a diet of quantitative models and American perspectives on HR, such as viewing people as a variable cost rather than the only asset that can appreciate in value and limiting talent management to incentivizing white-collar knowledge workers."

In another article, ‘We need to be clear how to handle Gen Y', it says that "Mr S.Y. Siddiqui, Managing Executive Officer- Administration (HR, Finance & IT) at Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, is convinced that the root of the problem was Gen Y that ‘went in the wrong direction.'"

That's a curiously contrarian point of view. While Mr Siddiqui goes on to say "The third is in our senior management. I think in terms of our culture building capability, we did have some gaps", there is this insidious thought in my mind that perhaps Gen Y was going in whichever it wanted to go, but perhaps the management was not looking.
 
In a report called "Global Workplace Innovation - Generation Y and the Workplace Annual Report 2010", for Johnson Controls (freely downloaded from the Net), the section on India has this to say:

"Who is the Generation Y in India?

"In India, they make up the more than half of the population. Despite the large potential workforce, not all are ‘employment ready’ and so their talents are in short supply. The Generation Y in India is a remarkable group that is ambitious, optimistic, embraces change and have a clear sense of where they are headed. Most are ‘entrepreneurial and business savvy, as well as technologically capable and connected.

"With about half of India’s one billion people under the age of 25, Generation Y in India is the world’s largest. Positioned in a time of exciting and rapid economic growth in the country, they are keen to participate in the country’s future and success. The country’s recent parliament elections saw a huge turnout of Generation Y population, demonstrating their ambition to take the country forward. Highly competitive, Generation Y is more than ever before seeking higher education and landing jobs in multi-national companies in areas such as IT, back office operations, media, strategy and management positions. With opportunities aplenty in the current economy, they are also job-hopping, something not seen in their parents’ generation."

There's more of this; you could download the whole report and read it yourself, if you so desire. 

If this understanding is correct, it would seem to me that Mr Siddiqui's statement that "Therefore my first premise is that whichever company, whichever sector, we need to have a very clear thinking how we are going to handle Gen Y", is really patronising. Or is this a standard managerial perspective? That you 'handle' people, not understand them and their motivations, and work together for a common win-win game?

I am not a HR person by qualification or nature of work - I hope some of you are and we could discuss this matter - I believe there needs to be a much degree of sensitivity in dealing with people than I seem to notice in the Business Line article.

Voice of Youth

My friend Steve Correa has sent me these two vids. I love them, and have his permission to share them. These are part of a presentation he had made at a recent NHRD conference.

What Makes a Video Go Viral

Now we know the secrets of great viral video ads! And, lo and behold, the secrets don't come from ad agencies or data analytics companies; they come from academia.

The article is reproduced below. You can read it here in Scientific American.

"New Theory Explains What Makes a Video Go Viral

"According to an algorithm, the four ingredients required are congruency, emotive strength, network involvement and something called "paired meme synergy".

"More than 10 million people have watched a YouTube video of an iPhone being pulverized in a blender. It's actually a commercial for Blendtec — a company most viewers had probably never heard of. But with the viral clip, Blendtec let social networking spread its name and message rather than paying for a mass advertising campaign. And it worked like a charm.

"Viral-produced movies" are the new holy grail of advertising, but they're tough to pull off. Only the best among them can overcome the slight annoyance people feel when they realize a video they enjoyed was actually an ad — and yet compel them to share it with friends anyway. As Brent Coker, a marketing professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, says, "Ensuring the success of a viral-produced movie is still largely hit-and-miss … babies, pranks, and stunts seem to have great success on some occasions, but turn into catastrophic failures on others."

"So what defines a great ad — one that a viewer will choose to Tweet or post to Facebook?

"Coker has come up with a recipe for success called the branded viral movie predictor algorithm. According to the algorithm, the four ingredients required for a video to go viral are congruency, emotive strength, network involvement, and something called "paired meme synergy."

"First, the themes of a video must be congruent with people's pre-existing knowledge of the brand it is advertising. "For example, Harley Davidson for most people is associated with Freedom, Muscle, Tattoos, and Membership," Coker explained on his website. Videos that strengthen that association meet with approval, "but as soon as we witness associations with the brand that are inconsistent with our brand knowledge, we feel tension." In the latter case, few people will share the video, and it will quickly "go extinct."

"Second, only viral-produced videos with strong emotional appeal make the cut, and the more extreme the emotions, the better. Happy and funny videos don't tend to fare as well as scary or disgusting ones, Coker said.

"Third, videos must be relevant to a large network of people — college students or office workers, for example.

"And last, Coker came up with 16 concepts — known on the Internet as "memes" — that viral-produced videos tend to have, and discovered that videos only go viral if they have the right pairings of these concepts. "When combined, some combinations appear to work better together than others," he told Life's Little Mysteries.

"For example, the concept he calls Voyeur, which is when a video appears to be someone's mobile phone footage, works well when combined with Eyes Surprise — unexpectedness. These also work well in combination with Simulation Trigger, which is when "the viewer imagines themselves being friends [with the people in the video] and sharing the same ideals," he said.

According to Coker, one viral video that used all three of those memes — and exemplified the other BVMP strategies, too — was a 2007 ad by Quiksilver, the beach apparel company. The grainy footage showed surfers throwing dynamite in a river and surfing on the resulting waves. It quickly topped 1 million views."

IIT and AIEEE coaching classes – Villians or Necessary evils

IIT and AIEEE coaching classes – Villians or Necessary evils

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011 - New Scientist

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011 - New Scientist

10 Famous Literary Characters and Their Real-Life Inspirations

Not my work - got this from here. You really have to go to the link above - the first page of the original post is reproduced here. 
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We all know truth is stranger than fiction, and some things (and people) are just too good to have been made up. We’ve already shown you quirky cartoon characters based on real people, and though we imagine there are many more life-to-literature adaptations than life-to-cartoon, we’ve decided to continue the trend and pick some of our favorite famous literary characters inspired by real-life people. For the most part, we’ve skipped the autobiographical inspirations, mostly because there are too many too count, though many writers would probably tell you there’s a little bit of themselves in every character they write, so in some ways that distinction is a losing battle. Click through to read out list of ten famous literary characters and their real-life counterparts, and let us know your own picks for your favorite truth-inspired heroes and heroines in the comments!

Tintin — Palle Huld

The 15-year-old Danish writer and actor’s 1928 voyage around the world, documented in his book Around the World in 44 days by Palle reportedly inspired Hergé’s Tintin, himself a young jet-setting fellow. As far as we can tell, Snowy was just a stroke of pure genius invention.

The Art of the Semi-Autobiographical Novel

Not my own work, I hasten to add. But brilliant nonetheless. I don't know where it was originally posted - it came to me via a friend. Read on. 
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To assuage our interest and close the circle, we decided to follow up with a list of a few of our favorite semi-autobiographical novels — that is, novels wherein at least one character is based on the author, and usually containing a plot that revolves around the author’s true-life experiences. Click through to check out ten of our favorite semi-autobiographical novels, from the barely-veiled straight autobiographies to the masterful collages of life and fiction. We know there are hundreds and hundreds of these, so please chime in and let us know your own favorite semi-autobiographies in the comments!

We the Animals, Justin Torres

Justin Torres’s unbelievably exquisite debut novel could be described as a collection of searing anecdotes, gradually easing the narrator away from his collective self-awareness as part of three brothers (“We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more”) to the painful, necessary schism into “they” and “I.” He admits that he drew much of the story and characters from his own life, and when we saw him read, he laughed large at the “how autobiographical is it really?” question and shrugged, but the more he spoke, the more he seemed like his narrator. “Your consciousness is informed by your experience,” he said. “It’s just how the mind works.”

Black Swan Green, David Mitchell 

Though you may not know it (unless you’ve read this novel), celebrated author David Mitchell suffers from a stammer. In an article he wrote celebrating The King’s Speech for being the first film to accurately portray the speech defect as he experiences it, he wrote, “Despite growing up in a much saner family than the Duke of York’s, my open and kind parents and I discussed my speech impediment exactly never, and this “don’t mention the stammer” policy was continued by friends and colleagues into my thirties. I’d probably still be avoiding the subject today had I not outed myself by writing a semi-autobiographical novel, Black Swan Green, narrated by a stammering 13 year old.”

Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury

Though not his most famous work, Dandelion Wine is a beautiful, magical rumination on boyhood and the myth of the eternal summer. Recently, just before Bradbury’s 91st birthday, it was announced that Black Swan producer Mike Medavoy would produce a film version of the novel in conjunction with Bradbury. Of the project, Bradbury said, “This is the best birthday gift I could ask for. Today, I have been reborn! Dandelion Wine is my most deeply personal work and brings back memories of sheer joy as well as terror. This is the story of me as a young boy and the magic of an unforgettable summer which still holds a mystical power over me.” [Ray is one of my absolute favourite writers and this is one of my absolute favourite books by him - Jayanta.]

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

It’s well known that Sylvia Plath’s only novel, originally published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas” in 1963, is based on Plath’s own descent into clinical depression. Like her protagonist, Esther Greenwood, Plath had a magazine internship in college, met with a similar mentor, was rejected from a writing course she desperately wanted to take, and fell into a deep, lingering depression. Unlike Esther, however, Plath was unable to pull herself back into the world, and committed suicide about a month after the book’s UK publication.

Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin

“Mountain,” Baldwin once said, “is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.” The book, based in part on the author’s own experiences as a teenage preacher in a small church in Harlem, is a fantastic, tense tale of a 14-year-old boy’s spiritual awakening and moral maturation.

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s semi-autobiographical novel of World War I marked a turn towards the romantic for him — though perhaps everyone gets a little romantic about what they see in their own life. Many of the characters — Catherine Barkley, Helen Ferguson, the priest — are based on real-life people, and of course Henry is based on Hemingway himself and his own doomed romance when he served in the Italian campaigns of the First World War.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre was originally published in London in 1847 as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography with the pen name “Currer Bell.” Though the autobiographical subtitle was dropped when Brontë dropped the pen name (a sort of obvious correlation there, if you ask us), scholars have found many similarities between the story and Brontë’s own life. Like Jane, Brontë was an orphan sent to live in a terrible boarding school, and it was there her two elder sisters died, rather than just a friend, as in Jane Eyre.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

Perhaps the most famous semi-autobiographical novel, Joyce’s Bildungsroman follows Stephen Dedalus as he begins to buck the traditions of his Irish Catholic childhood, before finally taking leave of Ireland to pursue his ambitions as an artist. Many editions of the novel have pictures of Joyce on the cover — no need to pretend to model this Dedalus character after anyone else (except of course the mythical character of Daedalus).

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

Alcott’s novel, which follows the lives and experiences of four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March, is based on her own experience growing up with three sisters and set in the same house where it was written, Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts. Alcott is Jo, of course — who else?

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson’s notorious drug-addled novel was based on based on two actual drug-addled trips to Las Vegas that Thompson took (with his attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta, of course) in March and April 1971, while reporting for Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated. Supposedly, most of what would become his most famous novel was scribbled frantically in his notebook at the tail end of each of these trips. In cases like this, Thompson’s famed adage bears repeating: “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” Yes they have. [And Ralph Steadman's drawings are magical! - Jayanta]