Lessons from GE

 It was just a few years ago that GE was extolled as one of the greatest firms that survived multiple decades/centuries to remain in the index while many withered away.

And today we see GE on a precipitous decline and booted out from the index. As always, failures offer greater lessons than successes. So what can we learn?

If I attempt to distil it down to one simple lesson — it is the failure of the 3 Horizon play. The 3 horizons that any firm is supposed to manage well are the Current, Adjacent and Disruptive.

Not too long ago, GE was given a discount by the stockmarket called ‘Conglomerate discount’. It was too varied and broad that the stock market thought it did not enough focus and excellence in specific areas and hence discounted the stock price. This is the Adjacent.

The problems of the current are too obvious. Poor capital decisions, window dressing of the business numbers with creative accounting from finance business, stagnant market segments, Ostrich mentality, rubber stamp board members….

On disruptive, while there were many initiatives such as GE Digital leveraging Internet of Things etc, they were too small to offset the declines in the first two horizons.

In Summary, failing to manage all the three horizons !

What is wrong with Digital?

Everyone from stock markets, venture capitalists, enterpreneurs,students are so enamored by Digital that it has almost become sacrilegious to say anything against it.

Taking inspiration from John Mayer’s song ‘Say’

“Knowing you’d be better off instead,
If you could only

Say what you need to say….

You’d better know that in the end
Its better to say too much
than never to say what you need to say !”

So here it goes.

1. Digital is not cheap : Inspite of media touting about crashing hardware costs, everything on cloud etc etc, Digital is not cheap. The skills are in short supply , grounded engineers who are multi dimensional and focused on solving business problems are fewer , marketing against the noise takes lot of money and the competition is from every nook and corner of the world.
2. Digital , for its own sake? : Its easy to get occupied with Digital and lose sight of the business impacts, ROI, cost vs return, opportunity costs, bandwidth, alternatives to digital etc. Are you doing Digital for the sake of digital / because of peers, fear of losing out OR do you really have a ‘well thought out strategy’ with fallback options/exit routes and Plan B/C/…. ?
3. Everyone is not FANG ( Facebook, Apple,Netflix,Google) : Temptation to imitate the unicorns of silicon valley is not small but everyone is not FANG. Blind imitation will only lead to disaster.
4. Funding Traps : Every round of funding comes with more dilution, more stringent terms, more loss of control and more unrealistic demands. If you feel like you are riding a tiger, you are probably right. As someone famously said “Venture Capitalists are like hitchhikers with credit cards. They get in your car, and as long as you take them where they want to go, they will help pay for the gas. But if you get lost or wander off the road you promised you were going down, they will hijack the car, throw you out and bring in a new driver.”
5. Timing : It is better to acknowledge that many technologies are in their infancy, not robust enough, do not have wider adoption and yet to make big impacts in the real world. Your play with them is likely to be longer term that needs dollops of patience and perseverance.

Go into Digital with your eyes wide open, being aware of both sides of the coin.

Grit - Little Known Secret

You could have the greatest / most original ideas and thought processes in the world but to see them make an impact needs this less glamorous, critical attribute — Grit. It is not simple dogged persistence, illogical pursuits, blind obsession…

Its different from these. It is conviction , end goal orientation, learning from the setbacks on the way, not losing focus, not giving up early.

Almost everything that can go wrong, will and usually does go wrong. People cross your paths, block your progress, surprises appear, unforeseen accidents happen, plans go awry. If you encounter challenges that nobody predicted, possibly because nobody attempted what you are trying to do. Its the curse of the torch bearer.

One of the key skills most valued today is enterprenurial expreience . Why? It takes lot more than skills and knowledge to cross the known and venture into something unknown , results unpredictable and success so elusive. More than the success/failure of the enterpreneurial venture, the learnings and experiences are so priceless as no academic course can teach them. More and more of the business world today is about re-imagining because , if you dont do it, someone else will.

A key enterprenuerial attribute is Grit. As John Mackey — founder of Whole foods says, everytime someone told him his idea won't work or had unforeseen challenges, he realised that he is trying something none has done before. Many of his co-founders left the venture, his expansion plans failed, media riled him…..

“Mackey has something which 99% of all CEO’s lack: grit and [guts]. Good for him. I may even go buy something at Whole Foods! Do they sell cigarettes?” commented “Drathaeur,” referring to the August Wall Street Journal op-ed on health-care reform.

While Amazon buying Whole Foods does not vindicate him, the learning is about the little spoken quality of Grit that is an attribute thats so valuable in real world.

One more reason why Robots and Excel spreadsheets cannot create value from an algorithm!!

Play in 'Unfamiliar' ground?

 Typically you would hear many folks starting up in an area of their experience. Ex Amazon employees starting Flipkart, Marketing folks starting up marketing tech startups, Ex tech company employees starting up another tech start up …. You get the picture.

The logic for doing this seems reasonable. You are in ‘ familiar ground’, you know the play, players, nuts and bolts. You will sound credible when you pitch your idea to future employees and investors. There is more ‘plausibility’ of it going right.

Here is the tricky part. Its ultimately a business which has to thrive on someone ( an individual or a business) parting their hard earned money for whatever you plan to offer. And they will do it ONLY if it solves a good enough problem or brings signicantly more value than the current options.

The tricky part is, just because your credentials are in a particular area, ‘must not’ mean that

• there is a huge problem there waiting to be solved or ( opportunity)
• the current solvers are not ‘good enough’ or that ( competition)
• there is a dramatically new way to solve the problem. ( reimagination)

Be willing to let go off the familiar ground, if you cannot satisfy the above. Remember, you dont control most of the above. On the other hand, you identify an area that meets the above criteria and its not where your past ‘credentials’ are, there is still an opportunity!

Do not let the familiarity dominate the business case. It may not be a ‘business case’ in the first place!

Data as Growth Enabler

With mobile apps, social media throwing up huge goblets of data, its almost criminal not to leverage insights that come from it. Traditionally such efforts need a lot of upfront investments with value from the data unknown. As machine learning/AI replace/supplement human judgement , plowing data for patterns/insights is now almost mandatory. If you are not doing it, your competitor is doing it and is able to cross sell/up sell better thanks to them.

With cloud based infrastructure costs coming down year on year and available on demand and usage based, the barriers/thresholds to leveraging data have also come down significantly. So all the tools exist and its now left to your creativity/imagination.

The data , its volumes, its storage is not all that valuable if the insights that come out of it are not powerful enough. So value is in insights and the methodologies to extract insights. Value is also in triaging the insights to see which ones make most business impact.

If you are able to understand the business intricacies and figure out what insights will tip the scale in your favour in the market place, that’s the creamy part. Everything else is on-demand commodity.

Can technology prevent bankruptcies?

Across the globe, organised watch dog functions have not prevented failures. The rating firms could not predict Lehman collapse, the auditors could not prevent Enron bankruptcy and human referees continue to make wrong decisions in sporting arenas.

Audit firms want consulting revenue, rating firms want revenue retention and the referees play role ( sometimes) in fixing matches. If you have seen the oscar winning documentary “Inside Job”, its a cess pool.

On the other hand, a number of sports have implemented technology to remove /reduce human judgement errors — take the example of 3rd eye view for LBW decisions in cricket. Or the camera close up view for in/out calls in tennis.

What If?

What If typical control failures are codified and control breaches are made public, after providing a window for correction?

Lets take an example.

The systemically important institution IL&FS in India which is an infrastructure lending organisation works on funding long term projects. The fact that it did that using short term money was a disaster waiting to happen. What if this control breach was automatically flagged by technology ( with access to company books of accounts) ? Would that have triggered a more prompt action preventing defaults ?

The checklists/controls used by auditors to assess a company’s financial health can be monitored by technology more assiduously than any human.

Any breaches of controls/thresholds are first highlighted to management for action and post a certain time window, made public by technology. Just as a tv viewer can make out whether a tennis shot is in /out, a common investor can clearly see how good is the company running.

While there could be many objections to this from vested interests, one cannot dispute the fact that technology enabled open data can help prevent disasters before humans do.

Multiplier effect and Valuations

Over 50% of the US market cap is from tech companies — FANG ( Facebook, Apple,Netflix and Google). Many new age companies with poor profitability have valuations that are difficult to believe for the traditionalists. What gives?

The factors that drive these valuations have implications for any startup /ideation not to build valuations but to imagine a business model and product for the digital age.

There are a number of multipler effects in play that cause these valuations and here are a few below:

1. User Adoption : Most of the digital natives focus initially on user adoption rather than revenue/profit. While this is not to belittle the criticality of cashflows/profit, the reasons for user adoption are different. Most of the digital natives reimagine a business model and rewrite the traditional methods. This needs users to adopt to the new way of doing things , realise the benefits and create ‘word of mouth’. Focus on bottomlines initially takes the focus away from user adoption and building a sizable user population.
2. Upgrade Cycles: Once the user population is built, the focus is on user engagement to keep them hooked on to the platform, come back to it more often, spend more time on the platform, try newer features of the platform. Every click on the platform is noted, analysed to ‘learn’. This enables upgrades, buy paid products /services in a ‘freemium’ model and build stickiness/moat.
3. 24/7 Feedback and weekly /daily enhancements: User engagement enables continuous feedback to switch on/off new features , focus on enhancing the items that users care about and make quick corrections. When Xiomi makes weekly software updates based on user feedback on the platform/forums, Amazon talks about customer centricity — measures metrics on each feature every minute, when startups update apps ‘on the cloud’, all of this is to get it ‘absolutely right for the user/customer’.
4. ‘Almost Zero cost of Cross-sell’ : Once Paytm has millions of customers using the platform and there are mechanisms to bring them back all the time, cross selling is as simple as adding a new category/offering on the platform and instantly its available to the user population to try and add to topline/bottomlines. Every new offering addition to the platform comes at much much lower costs improving the margins and enabling geometric profit growth.
5. Built in Non-Linearity : Built in non-linearity means addition of users do not mean costs for every user added.

Thus the factors for valuing the digital firms is quite different and the traditional models of Discounted cash flows, P/E multiples , peer comparisons do not work here. Having said that, each business is finding the emergence of ‘digital duopolies’. Thats a topic for another post.

Engineering the 'Switch'

Whether you are planning a new product /platform/service, it is most likely that the target customers are already doing the same thing in a ( less efficient/more cumbersome/ costlier/ longer) way but doing it all the same. Be it a financial transaction or a business process or a life activity.

It is also likely that the alternatives to ‘current way of doing things’ are also many. In the digitally native world, there are literally 100s of taxi ride apps, e-commerce apps, payment apps, news apps, personal finance apps….

So you are starting with a ‘set, old way of doing things’ and a bunch of alternatives to ‘ do it better’. Since digital world is all about ‘user adoption’, getting the user/customer to ‘do it your way’ is the absolutely critical thing.

How to engineer this switch?

1. Power of Inertia : Nothing is your bigger enemy than inertia. Inspite of cheaper loans, cards with better rewards, data plans with better goodies etc, only a small percentage of customers switch to the ‘smarter’ option. Why? Simply because it takes effort to change and also the comfort with the present.
2. Small ‘Delta’ : No matter how great you think about your product/service/platform and consider everything else to be from stone age, most of the times customers find that the delta between the ‘current’ and ‘new’ is not significant. Combine this with the pain of change and you can be sure , what the customer would do.
3. Power of ‘Viral’: Functionally an Amazon Pay or Google Pay or Apple Pay might be better than Paytm. But if paytm is viral across the population compared to others, the functional differentiation does not matter.
4. Power of ‘Soft’ factors : Inspite of how ‘you want the customer to think’, customer processes/likes/dislikes on their own criteria. Customer may pick a product not necessarily based on what gives most value but which is ‘easiest/smoothest to use’, which is ‘more fun to use’ ( think gamification) and which has nicer bells and whistles.

So how to engineer the switch?

a. Focus on the product attributes that make the delta the largest possible

b. Look for items/ make it easy to share /crowd source/like/viral

c. Sweat the ‘soft’ stuff. Remember , most of the digital natives are young and younger. User Experience, Gamification, Fun…

Maze or Amaze?

In the history of times, when something amazing happens, many people do not realise it. After it has happened, there is no need to justify the amazement.

Something similar is happening in our times and you either get caught in the Maze, be Amazed or make the best of it.

1. More of the global wealth creation is happening in Services, intangibles, intellectual property and Data , rather than hard assets like land, gold, oil etc.
2. Consequently economies are powered by services with lesser contributions from manufacturing, agriculture.
3. Amassment and accumulation for future proofing is also in the above areas and not the traditional asset classes. ( Alibaba and Tencent buying everything in Digital, $500Mn AI venture fund, 50% of US market cap in the hands of digital firms…. , Dead dinosaurs like Blackberry, Motorola, Nokia living on IP royalties…)
4. Resetting and reskilling every few years becoming the norm, thanks to the Gig economy. Job categories disappearing every day.
5. Digital is touching every sphere of life from flipping elections, citizens deciding on how to spend the tax money, overthrowing governments, uprooting old business models and industries..
6. Typical barriers to start a business crashed already. You must have heard of 1 or 2 person companies, outsourcing everything to Amazon cloud, specialist firms and starting a business from an idea over a weekend.

While sceptics doubt anything will touch them, the revolution is taking place. Hopefully you don't miss it and only realise it after the fact!

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When are we most peaceful and happiest?

There are 4  States of consciousness. The first one is the conscious state. The second one is the dreamy state. The third one is the subconscious state. The fourth one beyond all three is the happiest.

We are in this state every night when we go in to deep sleep. There are no thoughts,the mind is not active and there's nothing to distract.

This is the happiest and the most peaceful state. We all know it ,yet we try to avoid it all the time.

Be it our need to be recognised ,to be part of a group ,to be continuously in touch,to be continuously busy ....

Technology and more importantly the businesses are trying to help us do all the above, not for our sake but for their commercial needs.

While it's easy to blame the technology to keep us forever busy, it is our innate need to be a social animal that makes us embrace these technologies with gusto.

What is forgotten or ignored is to be at peace with nothing and nobody. That's really the deep sleep state in which we are the happiest.

The more desperation with which we try to be in the first three states ,the more restless and unhappy we become.

Our natural state is the fourth state. You are at once more peaceful and blissful when you tried to be in the fourth state than the others.

That is not a technology issue but your own choice.

The 'Unseen'

In the great Indian epic of Mahabharata, the great archer   Arjuna is asked by his teacher on what he sees. Unlike his peers who see a number of things such as trees, objects, people, sky etc, Arjuna replies that he sees only the eye of the bird. Arjuna then shoots the bird to kill with one arrow.

Cut to the world of innovation. When everyone sees noise,chaos, lots and lots of things, if you are able to see far into the future on how your idea will change the world, the impact it can potentially make and the consequential success it can make, its the first step to make the kill.

When everyone is finding reasons why the idea won't work, why its not a 'good'idea by conventional wisdom, how its not the way 'things are done by us', nothing matters more than the clarity of thought. Are you able to see through the mess/clutter/chaos to a better world? Are you able to mute the noise, ignore the distractions, think 10 steps ahead ?

How did Jeff Bezos see the world of single click purchase when people were afraid to use credit cards online? How did Muhammad Yunus see the group thinking benefits of micro finance when people only thought of individual lending? How did the Blockchain founder ('X') see disintermediation when everyone saw databases? How did Travis Kalanick see ride hailing when everyone saw maps?

Popular opinions serve the common denominator not the disruptions that change the world. People are comfortable with 'Status Quo' as its less risky and more predictable. The clarity of vision and thought and the ability to see the 'unseen' before everyone else is worth going against the tide!

Data is Money, Or.....?

 One of the reasons for high valuations of Google, Facebook etc is the sheer volume of data they hold which they can monetise. It is the reason Google assistant is able to answer you better than Alexa or Siri. The sheer volume of data it learns from.

Very soon, many players will have data. In the traditional world, there are many organisations which sit on mountains of data already. Then how is it they are unable to encash?

Before you think this note is a veiled pitch on analytics, it is not.

Let’s take an example. Spotify,itunes,Google music and many others have the same catalogues or content. Apple and Google have tons more money than Spotify. Then how is Spotify able to retain a large market share? What gives?

From the user behaviour, it has figured the right way to enhance playlists so it knows exactly how to delight you with a song based on what you just heard ,or heard before. This is why people are hooked to Spotify that it is able to 'know' exactly what they like and is playing the 'right' thing.

Apple and Google with the same catalogue of content haven’t figured this ,yet.

Bottomline is the value is not just in content( which will soon become a common denominator among quite a few), but in the connections to those pieces of content that could be the differentiator to hook the user.

You need not own the data, if you have the magic sauce of making the 'right' connections that bring value to the user!

Career gaps in Gig Economy

This is a real issue as the world moves to Gig economy where everyone from employers to workers are more comfortable in executing a gig and move on.Millennials are more comfortable with a discontinuous engagement /career track than others.

Latest is Amazon inviting freelancers with vehicles to work as delivery partners for their orders.

As this happens, there is more likely to be gaps between Gigs, some times many months as well.

while full time workers dont usually get time , trying to work more to prove their value and establish ' indispensability', the gig economy workers have the gaps which can cut both ways.

Here are two suggestions to make best use of the gaps between gigs.

1. Reskill, reskill and reskill - its best way to enhance your sale-ability and 'justify' the gaps to a recruiter. All large employers today face the challenge of retraining their work force to help them stay relevant. For gig workers, the gaps might be godsend to reskill themselves to get ready for the next gig better.

2.  Do Your Own Thing - go entrepreneurial!  Try something on your own and who knows, what started as a back of the napkin idea might become a business by itself. If it fails, you would have learnt valuable lessons that are so hard for any employer to train you on. As industries get disrputed, the entrepreneurial experience is an attribute that everyone values. It makes your profile more rounded and helps you stand apart!

Gone are the days when gaps in resumes are defended with reservations and fear. They are part of the new 'normal' and its up to you to make the best use of them to get ahead!

Simple trick to teach money to kids

Disclaimer: this idea is not mine. I learnt this from a friend of mine who did this to his kid.

Many parents struggle to help kids learn about money. Here is a very simple practical way to do it.

Based on the kids age etc, decide on the money you want to give at a periodicity. The amount and the frequency are not material.

The kid can do only THREE things with the money ( the only three things anyone can do) - spend, give,invest.

The kid can spend 1/3rd on anything he/she likes. The kid needs to give away 1/3rd to anyone in need. Another 1/3rd, the kid must invest. Put it in a bank or buy a share etc.

To get the next installment of money, the kid needs to explain what he/she did on the 2nd and third items.

It's that simple.

'Services only ' future

,Over the last few years most of the world's new wealth is going only to the small portion of the population. Is this simply the capitalists plundering the country's resources or is there something deeper?

1. If you look at the the richest individuals and the richest industries making the most money, you will see a pattern.

Most of them are services based ,almost none from agriculture and very few from manufacturing.

2. If you look at the industries needing  government help in the form of trade subsidies protectionism and bailouts, most of them are again in manufacturing and Agriculture.

When did you hear about services industry needing bailouts?

3. If you look at the US, world's largest economy , it's almost entirely based on services, with less than 2% coming in from agriculture. Just to put this in perspective ,agriculture was majority in the US few decades ago.

What are the above facts telling us? The world is moving towards service based economies while both manufacturing and agriculture do not seem to generate much differential wealth.

What are the implications of this? A service based economy is very much skill and expertise based. It also expects stakeholders to be very agile in adopting to the changing world.

while technology is automating quite a few services ,it is still services that are building incremental wealth.

How do the populations and communities build skills to be ready for a  Services based world?

How do they plan their finances to be continuously reskilling themselves every once in a while?

How do they become self dependent instead of expecting government doles and entitlements? ( No government or a tax base can perennially fund a losing business forever!)

How do they learn the key skills and attitudes of pivoting ,reskilling, migration and adapting?

How do they celebrate risk taking, failures , innovation and continuous learning?

These are the questions that I feel, the leaders, politicians and parents need to find answers to.

Fantastic Four

While the unicorn stories and dollar millionaire stories in the press make for good copy, its nowhere near the bed of roses when one starts. ‘Me Too’ versions, demanding customers, motivating employees, product development challenges, IP protection, the forever present Cash flow challenges, the elusive paying customers, marketing challenges, nagging investors….. what seemed like a great idea on the back of the napkin suddenly looks like an impossible dream or a fool’s endeavor!
What can keep you going to discover the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel? Here is the listing of the Fantastic Four qualities :

1. Passion : The #1 quality that comes thru when you interact with the first generation entrepreneur is the passion and the consequent conviction. Customers will buy the first product, employees will bite the offer , investors will commit on this quality. Do not let that die no matter the roadblocks!
2. Positivity : What you have achieved so far ( no matter how little that is) and why you should be thankful for and take inspiration from. Think of the distance covered rather than be overawed by how much is left to go. There is no shortage of doubting thomases, cynics, critics in this world. Do not let them kill your positivity. Its infectious!
3. Pivots : Have you looked at possible Pivots from hereon ? would they make a positive difference? Is there a pivot that can change the trajectory?
4. Peers: You don't have to learn everything from your own experience. No matter how unique you think you are, there are similar players who have gone thru similar challenges. Their experiences can teach you what to do and what to stay away from.

No entrepreneur works towards money. Their goals are bigger and better. The Fantastic Four will help them navigate the alligator infested waters!

The fairness of 1%

All over the world, political parties, pundits and socialists whine and crib about the unfairness of 1% of the world claiming a disproportionate share of world's wealth.

Before you think this is a political rant, let me clarify it is not. If you leave out the rank emotions and examine objectively, why only 1%? Why not 5% or 23%?

How many of the people you know think original and how many wait for instructions? How many are comfortable in the comfort of the routine and the usual? How many are comfortable with risk? How many try the unknown and new?

A great many of the world population wait to be driven or instructed or be told what to think and do. The facts about the multitude of  news channels , religious leaders, political leaders bear testimony to this fact. Many wait for a news article or a boss or a pundit on the tube to tell them what to think and do that day and the next. If the herd mentality assures wealth, it will get distributed among this huge majority and become dissipated.

Very very few venture the unknown , take chances and the risks of failures. A much lesser number of people are able to see beyond the immediate and take a bet on where the future is headed. They are ready to take the social and psychological shocks that come with it .

Granted all of them do not make it but the vast majority of those who make it, end up with a return that is proportional to the risks they took.

Before you crib about the unfairness of the 1% of the world who own a disproportionate share of world’s wealth, do think about your own choices and behaviours about where you wanted to be.

MVP vs MSP

MVP - Minimum Viable Product

MSP - Minimum sellable Product

The above ideas are critical for a startup on what to build. The dilemma for a startup is how much cash to burn in getting the first thing completed. MVP typically is that piece of the product that solves a particular problem completely and perhaps even the most efficiently.

But MVP does not necessarily mean customers will buy it. An MSP on the other hand has revenue focus from the word go. It is focused on getting the first paying customer and you build something until someone is willing to pay for it.

MSP is in that sense less idealistic and more pragmatic.

The question that comes next is which is more expensive to build. There is no easy standard answer. Either of them could be costlier. But the MSP agenda ensures that the product development is 'outside in', customer focused , differentiating and value delivering. MSP agenda also brings in an in-built cost control that the product development needs to be cost efficient and viable within the revenue it brings.

If MSP is so intuitively correct, why is it not practiced as often?

For starters, it focuses/limits your product development to a specific market segment instead of appealing to a broader market. This also limits the number of  early adopters in that segment who need to buy your product/offering. Your product could be ahead of time, not different enough or not enough 'wowing'.

But atleast it prevents a dogmatic entrepreneurial pursuit with no sense of cost /current market relevance.

As someone said famously ' War is fought with bullets and not money. But someone has got to  buy the bullets!'

Every startup's vision of changing the world costs money and someone has to pay for it to keep it going!

The Ignored Art of Storytelling

In the age of 140 character tweets, Chat messages, MCQs , 3 minute videos and breaking news ticker headlines, a critical skill that is getting ignored and ill-acquired is Storytelling.
whether you are pitching to investors for funding your startup idea, asking the first customers to try out your product/service, getting customers to commit to a long term relationship, convincing a prospective employee to join, get people to consider your approach vs others, managing investor expectations.... the everyday slots where storytelling becomes critical are just too many.

It is much different from selling/marketing and one will understand it if one knows how the greatest storytellers operate. There are multiple approaches and here are a few:

Frederick Forsyth - Story is conveyed through intricate minute details that make the story credible and almost real

James Patterson - Story is conveyed direct, simple and crisp so you get the storyline development with little effort and attention

Steve Jobs - Story is conveyed through impressive metrics, core principles and 'see it yourself' demos

Agatha Christie - The climax is conceived first and then the story is laid out in reverse order to condition your mind along a journey , the writer wants you to take

Jeff Bezos - Powerpoints are banned and every business idea is written as a a 6 page writeup that needs preparation, delving into multiple aspects with their pros and cons and helping the audience make a 'deeply informed decision'

Economist - Story is explained through style guides that have perfected the art of communicating to the people who matter, in the shortest possible time

Indian epics - story is conveyed through multiple stories embedded one inside the other

Elon Musk - story is conveyed more through the long term vision and the big picture

Bill Clinton - story is communicated by first establishing a deep connect with the audience

Adi Shankara - story is conveyed through rational, logical argument line that answers unasked questions and by removing all the incorrect options

As you can see from the above real world approaches, there is no one single way. And each approach has its strengths and vantage. Another common thread you can see is that more words help the audience picture/imagine better . It is also possible that the picture imagined by each recipient could be different from the other.

A critical enabler for Storytelling is the lost habit of reading. Reading helps energise neurons that the image/video cannot.

Also you might need to change the storytelling approach based on the audience, objective and the content.

No standup comic gets the joke delivery first time right! Keep learning and fine tuning approaches that work and suitable for specific occasions.

It needs significant preparation/homework, judging the audience, right delivery and answering questions.

The results make this way more than worth it !

Qualifying Innovation

As much as I hate this topic, it still is worth exploring. When huge majority of the world is doers and the percentage of true innovators is in single digit percentages , we shouldn't be qualifying innovation, right? While that argument can't be beaten, one still needs this topic to figure out what kind of behaviours to inculcate/promote. So here it goes.

In many places, what is innovation is determined by what is common. For teams/organisations which are highly creative/innovative, the bar is high and many things come across as 'minor improvements'. In other places, slightest change in 'the usual' might get celebrated.

1. With this context, it might be better to use an 'outside in' approach to qualify innovation. What does market/industry consider as 'the usual'? What is the maturity of customer organisations (B2B) /customers (B2C) in process/technology? This would be a good threshold to filter out ideas
2. Is the innovation 'improving' an existing practice or 're-imagining' ?
3. Is the idea 'complex'? This is a more pragmatic filter since most world impacting innovations are much 'simpler' . Also to keep in mind is the fact that Complex is Costly.
4. Where does the anchor lie for the idea? Does it improve life for the customer? Is customer the anchor or something else?
5. Source of idea: If it has come from the marketplace ( customer or competition), the idea is probably dated and tried out already with known results. While iPod is not the first portable music player and neither Mac the first personal computer, fundamental original ideas are more powerful than trying to do things better than whats already out there.
6. Passion behind the idea: Contrary to what many think of this as a negative, its the passion that sees things through in execution and not necessarily the idea itself. So if you want the idea executed and deliver results in real world, look for this quality.
7. Last but not the least: There is no formula for innovation as to what works. Also at the end of the day the spirit of Day 1 ( in Amazon parlance) and curiosity that counts and that is a culture worth nurturing irrespective of the idea.

5 Steps to Disruptive Innovation

With handy tools like the new age technologies, every millennial is dreaming of disruptive innovation, killing a business category or atleast changing the rules of the game in an industry ( on the way to a unicorn valuation ! ) What is disruptive innovation? 5 steps below

1.    No tinkering and delta changes. Think of the industry cost structures and what could fundamentally alter the business model and cost structures. Biggest motivator for a business change is cost. Re-imagine the business model with a new cost structure thats radically different

2.    While the new model will not be attractive to all the current stakeholders ( because you are removing some of them in the process! ), for faster adoption, make sure your new model appeals to the end customer first and then as many others as possible

3.    Do not start with technology. Draw up the re-imagined business model and see how the technologies/tools will make that a reality

4.    Never undersell the new business model on the cheap!

5.    Be prepared for the long haul. Disruptive changes occur at the fringes first since there is a backlash by incumbents. Persevere!

Its not the Tech, Stupid!

There is no shortage of tech buzz words ( Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Analytics, Chatbots, NLP....) that promise to end the world as we know it, change our lives for the better and so on.... But the reality is far more humbling. The reason? Choose the right problem where the appropriate tech is the right solution. Not the other way round : Have a solution and start looking for a problem!!!!

The long lead times between a technology riding the hype cycle and making life changing impact is precisely this. The lack of imagination in identifying the right use case for the right tech to make a business impact. This needs to be done keeping in mind that there may not be any solution today, current tools/instruments ( thats what technologies are) may not be the solutions, current technologies still are up the maturity cycle before they become useful/applicable.

Also to keep in mind are the aspects of current insecurities and mind blocks in accepting disruptive business models and the enabling technologies. Long lasting changes happen at fringes initially, take longer to become mainstream and come across many roadblocks on the way. Conviction, Perseverance, dollops of luck....drivers of change.

The Power of Curiosity

World over as rule baed processes get automated /done more efficiently by bots, new skills are coming to fore that make impact. The one skill that all of us had as kids is sorely missing now a days as people get older and get into rote roles or fixed silos - Curiosity

The sheer interest/enthusiasm to know why something is happening, what if something different is tried out, think outside box for traditional problems, the will to try something new and see what happens! Why is this critical?

As futurists like Mark Stevenson travel world over to see the innovations that are making world changing impact, its the fundamental trait of curiosity and not being bogged by traditional routines imposed by time/ commercial organisations that is coming to fore as the winning skill. Be it simulating bacteria through crowdsourcing to cut the new drug discovery costs to a fraction in India, voters deciding how government spends its revenues and so on, the common trait of these innovators is curiosity.

Curiosity and resulting Innovation may perhaps never get done by a BOT or an algorithm. How prevalent is this skill in and around you?