Hiding in Plain Sight

 Any espionage thriller will tell you the best place to hide is where everyone can see you. Solutions to many pressing problems are also similar.

Every life/industry has long running open challenges or problems that need to be solved where the solution remains elusive. In many cases, the solution is hiding in plain sight. How to find it?

1. What is the problem? Is it the problem or symptom?
2. Is it material enough? Is it worth solving? will the impact be significant?
3. Kill ALL assumptions and conventions. Many a time, they come in the way. In the espionage example, stop searching for someone looking odd. The one trying to hide, also knows this.
4. Remove all noise ( naysayers, dissuaders, bystanders...)
5. Just as the problem took long time to develop/survive, the solution may also need time. Pain killer suppresses pain instantly but reducing weight to relieve stressed joints , takes time.
6. Can the strength of the problem be leveraged for the solution? Not different from deflecting an oncoming weapon to the enemy.
7. Can the problem be made irrelevant ( This is different from finding a solution to the problem ) ? Is there a path that does not include this problem at all?
8. Do not hesitate to try the solution(s) . " Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. - Arthur Conan Doyle "
9. Trying every solution helps you define the problem with more clarity and takes you closer to the solution.
10. Why did we not think of this solution that has been hiding in plain sight?

Long on long, Short on short

 Typically humans tend to be positive on the long term and negative on the short term. Is this just my opinion? let's see.

1. Stock markets have a typical upward drift over the long term. Given the underlying sentiment, it is safe to assume humans are positive on the long term.
2. Humans respond to negative news ( short term) more and faster. Negative items have higher views/ engagement/curiosity. Which newspaper/news channel gets more eyeballs saying everything is good?
3. A common perception is that we have more control over the immediate/short term than long term ( Is this perception the truth, is another matter!). A long term weight reduction plan gets lesser attention than an instant gratification. More effort/money is spent globally on cures than prevention. Probably because we don't believe something bad may happen in the long term. Armageddon predictions by the cults are considered funny at best and ignored.
4. Our own attention spans tend to focus more on the short term . A game that gets done in an hour or less has more viewers than a game that runs for days and weeks.

It is probably this view that is continually shortening the cycles of consumption, economy, entertainment, pursuits that the true tectonic human endeavors are ignored.

The 3 truths

 Be it Pulitzer winning journalism, the judiciary,science, philosophy : all of them pursue truth. The problem with the truth is there are many versions of it. Understanding these versions help us understand reality and solve problems better. How?

Let us take a few examples to appreciate these better. Few years ago, world believed that someone who is good at many things will survive and grow. Multi taskers, Conglomerates, Super Apps, Jacks of all, Generalist MBAs... Firms that provided products across market segments, value/price spectrum were valued highly. ( General Electric, Samsung...).It was the reality and truth for some time. Over a period, those were found to be lacking depth/moat and were pummeled by specialists. ( Apple, Tesla, Super specialists with deep skills and expertise in a specific area, Uber, Airbnb...). Suddenly this became the truth that everyone started respecting. Hypes that go through cycles usually have an agenda owner/motive owner behind ( 'Cui Bono'). A truth that changes over time based on what is real at a specific point of time. Powerful people create a 'truth' that they want everyone to believe in. It is called truth based on a reference /authority/agenda or motive owner and is gone later when the reference/authority/agenda owner vanishes.

During multiple booms, markets, investors, governments and publics were seeing value where none existed. Dot Com boom until it got bust was glorified by everyone. Easy money based valuations in last few years made nations yearn for their own unicorns even if they were illusory. German government was praising Wirecard as a national icon until it was'nt. They were seeing something that did not exist. People who did not understand 'tech valuations' were branded luddites. This 'truth' has no basis and existence. It is an illusion.

The eternal truth is different from both the above. It neither depends on reference nor is illusory. It does not change with anything. Getting to this is not easy or straightforward. Before you get to this eternal truth, first you need to look at the current realities and see if they belong to any of the above and rule them out. Process of elimination gets you closer to the eternal truth. The clarity alone is worth the effort!

Metaverse and Money

 As Metaverse crystallizes, what could be the opportunities for money and finance ? Is it another hype inducing buzzword to sell technology and services? Or will it be too late to leverage , when ( and if ) it becomes real?

Approximately 100 years ago, 1920s marked the onset of great depression, spanish flu, epidemics, earthquakes and nobody would have predicted that 100 years later world would have been lot more prosperous, living longer and better, trillion dollar tech companies exploring alternative universes and electric cars. Yet here we are. As Metaverse takes shape, should we even bother?

Humans are possibly the only species that can dream and visualize worlds. our books and dreams help us expand our mental horizons, our simulators help us get trained, our games help us achieve fantasies and our fiction comics help us get entertained. Before we rubbish all these, the sheer businesses that comics/games/ comic character based movies generate is no laughing stock. The most successful ( almost guaranteed hit) theme for hollywood is Comic sequels. We are not as realists as we consider ourselves to be.

Money and the financial world has multiple opportunities to explore in Metaverse, given this background.

1. Conceivably, there would be metaverse natives ( just like digital native millennials) who engage in metaverse /web and mobile 2.0 seamlessly. For these generations, metaverse is not an odd ball but part of their digital lives. Offering financial services to them / managing their wealth/investments is an obvious area.
2. Metaverse can be an excellent test market for new offerings once there is enough 'population' and activity. Tiktok got its first billion users in half the time it took Facebook (Meta) to get.
3. Digital goods /services and their market ecosystems can be easily enabled in Metaverse which can be transacted through NFTs/ tokens/ digital barter and other tokenized value forms that are yet to emerge. Creating/valuing/enabling/accounting/holding are all opportunities for financial services firms.
4. Conceivably physical wealth/assets would be proxied in Metaverse and all of these need planning/management/optimization. Digital assets would also be part of estate planning for future generations as they hold value.
5. Traction will be followed by Regulation eventually and the participants need help in ensuring compliance.

1920s could not predict 2020s and the same is true going forward. Resilient enterprises need to keep experimenting and funding green shoots that keep them relevant as market cycles become shorter. Early bird gets the worm!!!

Mass, Speed and Impact

 Momentum is the product of mass and velocity: greater the momentum, greater the impact. For highest impact, highest possible mass and speed are needed. For organizations and markets chasing highest impact from innovation, greatest change ( mass) needs to happen at fastest speed ( velocity). Unfortunately world can handle neither.

Typically innovation starts at fringes. Main stream innovation is too much disturbance and can rock the boat. Another reason for this is the sheer resistance to change from various stakeholders. Status quo over time would have created and established ‘rent-seekers’ who wouldn’t like anything changed to their pension pots. since the rent seekers dominate status quo, the resistance posed by them to change is also massive. And that creates the exact opposite momentum for the innovation. Add the business vagaries /changing priorities/markets to the mix and one can see why the momentum is not high.

How to crack this conundrum?

1. Perspective: Understanding the above dynamic is a crucial step to know the baseline.
2. Passion and Perseverance: Two critical ‘P’s for any innovator whose importance cannot be overstated.
3. People: Knowing the stakeholders ( including the ‘rent seekers’ ) and figuring out/articulating ‘what is in it for each of them’, from the innovation.
4. Pareto’s Principle: Identify and focus on the 20% of the market that can create 80% mind share
5. Proof : Believing in innovation is different from proving it to others. Make sure the numbers and results justify the pain of change and make it the ‘right thing to do’.

Instant gratification digital economy has convinced everyone that all changes are fast. Ordering a cab on a mobile app and DNA sequencing/gene editing cannot be at the same pace. Fundamental/Tectonic shifts happen over longer periods but the impacts are also significantly higher at higher mass. Size of resistance is a proof of size of change and the size of benefits!!! Contrary to popular opinion, speed may be secondary.

More

Buzzword Factories

 Search Engine algorithms, Social Media, Online news have all made buzzwords more popular than before. And that hurts serious innovation.

Buzzword is a word or phrase, especially one connected with a particular subject, that has become fashionable and popular, and is used a lot in newspapers etc, as per Oxford Dictionary. They are now seen in most news articles, powerpoint presentations, resumes, youtube videos and websites. The shallowness associated with these creates disappointments, biases, perceptions that often cloud serious work.

An excellent example of this is AI. Today we see this more often than normal English word like bread. While the world is yet to successfully deploy autonomous driving / self sustaining Robots / make creative content at scale, we already seem to have artificially intelligent everything in our lives already. How is that even possible? Can any of the machines we use today, think on their own/ address situations they haven’t encountered before/ use intuition/ perceive threats and act subconsciously/ survive on their own…?

It is this disconnect that discredits AI due to the overuse of the buzzword. While every technology goes though its own hype cycle, the reckless use of buzzwords makes people look at everything as ‘Snake Oil’. Excess money chasing fewer startups and resulting funding of flaky business models canvassing buzzwords, does not help.

While all this happens, it should not affect serious exploration of what machines can learn and make our professional and personal lives easier. Just as all the buzz and the ups and downs of crypto currencies do not stop exploration of real world use cases of distributed ledger technology.

Let the buzzword factories do not discourage you from appreciating the true fundamental value of these technologies.

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft predicted that Apple will never get any significant market share ( his estimate was 2–3%). Warren Buffet avoided tech stocks for decades and today Apple is his biggest holding.

Every new thing is not Apple but it’s not a Blackberry either!

Step In

 The song Jerusalema was viral last year. Everyone at home tried to learn the addictive dance steps. How many took the effort to bother about the meaning of the song? Tourists spend billions going around the world clicking snaps and posting Instagram stories. How many bother with the story behind the site and what its trying to teach us? Step in.

Seeming lack of time in ‘busy’ lives, pressure to do as much/more than the next person push us into trying so many things, many peripherally. When Yoga teaches us to get fit and control our senses/breath, what are we supposed to do with the fitter body and controlled mind? When gadgets /apps/tech make life easier for you, what are you supposed to do with the extra free time?

If we try to step in to spend a bit more time and focus, one would see that the purpose of everyone of the above is much more than we see. Let us go deeper and not stay outside. Life would be much more peaceful/happy/fulfilling.

Wishing everyone a more meaningful 2022!

Mass Producing Creativity

 Humans took solace for quite sometime with an assertion that machines cant get creative. Will machines take over this frontier too?

If we scan the creative pursuits that we come across in our daily lives, these include movies, fine arts, writing ( news, articles,stories), singing…. It was common perception that this is one area where machines cant steal jobs from humans. Lets dig deeper.

From the notes and beats, every music form has its own rules and structures. Movies have various elements ( emotion, thrill, twist,drama…), stories have acts and so on. Over time humans have created constructs for every one of the creative forms. More importantly, our reactions to these elements are more predictable than we think. The number of views on a song over its duration, the audience engagement to a movie scene with a particular element, the number of likes/shares/comments to an article based on its elements … all of these are now recorded in digital world and are open to analysis and pattern recognition.

The constructs and the predictable human reaction to their elements , enable a machine to create a creative art form that works. This is how algorithms are able to write movie scripts, journalistic articles and even compose songs , hitherto inconceivable. Granted they dont look/sound/read well but just like the recommendation algorithms on amazon, they will get better over time.

So what is left for humans to do?

That’s something humans should figure out faster than machines!

What each of us can do to prevent our personal data theft

 With smart phones, laptops, social media and the armies of attention engineers employed by the tech firms, we have willingly become digital slaves sacrificing our privacy and personal data to avail services and convenience online. Some of us have unfortunately seen our identities misused/abused, our financial data compromised and much worse. What can each of us do personally to reduce the above risks ? ( This is a living list that gets updated as more ideas are collated. )

1. Use Google Takeout to export all your personal data from google accounts ( photos, drive, gmail etc) to your personal local computer/drives.
2. Once the above step is done, disable all ‘’auto upload settings’ of your data to Google /iCloud etc from your mobile phone/laptop/PC and other devices . Ensure this is done for all devices used by your family members. And then delete all this data on Google/icloud etc.
3. Create a mail account ( without any personal identifiers e.g. xyz12344@gmail.com ) and use this for all newsletter subscriptions/online services etc which could be potentially used by spammers/promotions etc.
4. Check and ensure that none of your online accounts contain personal financial information, passwords, personal identifiers etc.
5. Search for large mails ( mails with large attachments ) in your gmail account. Most of these big attachments contain data that would be personal and sensitive. Remove all such mails with big attachments from your mail accounts to reduce risk.
6. A simple cost effective way to manage your personal data is to have two pocket drives which act as back up to each other. You can get a 4Tb pocket drive on Amazon for Rs8k and use simple tools such as Free file sync to setup an automatic backup between these drives to update files between the drives at a frequency.
7. If you want the convenience of being able to share documents like Google Drive links, consider a costlier private cloud option with devices called Network Attached Storage devices ( NAS). One example is Synology.Such devices are connected to your home wifi network and will have storage drives ( which are expandable/stackable). Data that you back up on these drives can be accessed remotely from any device thru link sharing/apps etc. DO NOT DO A CLOUD BACK UP of your personal data on vendor’s cloud, no matter how secure they claim it to be. With such a setup, you can access your data anywhere on any device and share data with people you trust, WITHOUT STORING YOUR DATA ON ANY VENDOR’s CLOUD.
8. Do not submit any personal information on any online or offline forms/ raffle forms. These are magnets for data theft.
9. It is worthwhile to have two mobile SIMs , with one SIM exclusively for personal contacts. Also be ruthless in not installing/removing apps that can be potential data hacks . With finger print scanners and our indiscriminate allowing of apps to our mobile data, it does not take much for them to impersonate you on your personal finance/banking apps by reading your finger print data and the OTP.
10. By the same logic, avoid any financial app that does not authenticate you in atleast two ways before allowing data access/transactions.
11. No sharing of personal data/OTP/financial information on phone to anyone.

Third Side of the Coin

 In the recent Gamestop episode, there was a group of wallstreet firms who shorted the stock on one side, and the redditors who bet against that bet on the other. There was a third side. Being in that side is a skill worth cultivating.

The third side did not care about who was right or wrong. They just clinically looked at it as a momentum opportunity and made money on the stock price gains ( and probably on the way down as well!) As business and hype cycles get shorter over the next decade, many such opportunities present themselves. How do you see it ahead of the time or at the start, mobilize resources and take advantage of the opportunity before window closes? It is quite possible that the next opportunity might be diametrically opposite or unrelated to this one.

The ability to acquire or find skills for these short treasure hunts is a skill by itself. That can be broken down into (at least) the following:

1. Hustle: Ability to identify/acquire/mobilize resources
2. Accepting Risk: Awareness and comfort with the fact that quite a few of these may not work out ( as a smart man said : ‘ It is not an experiment if you already know the results in advance!’)
3. Against the Herd: Every social media/peer group/community wants you to ‘conform’. Going against is not easy or popular.
4. Learn and DO NOT repeat: The one thing in your control is to absorb learnings every time and ensuring you make only NEW mistakes, not OLD ones!
5. Be ( incredibly ) Fast! : Criticality of this cannot be overstated.

Now how many of the above qualities come naturally to us, taught to us? How to acquire these skills/behaviors ? Can they be ‘learnt’ at all? What current windows am I not seeing?

Risk- Life Saving Skill

 Driving and Swimming have always been considered the life saving skills. Risk taking needs to be added to this.

If there is one skill that’s never taught in schools and colleges, it is taking and managing risks. Risk is always described as something scary that needs to be avoided and worried about. Millennials are proving it wrong. Prior to 90s, Government ( and Public sector enterprises) was the biggest employer in India and the bureaucracy always taught one how to avoid taking any chances. Private enterprises became prominent in 2000s that slowly brought in meritocracy that focused on productivity and hard work.

The roaring twenties of 2020 have ushered in a world where nothing is certain. Best companies fall from grace and fail, Rock stars become persona-non-grata overnight and extremes have become more common , be it the inequalities in society , radical behaviors or social media generated movements. Firm which advocated that only ‘Paranoid survive’ is finding it tough to survive the brutal global tech enabled world. Pandemic is suddenly making the commercial real estate look shaky, dividend paying darlings of the pensioners are needing to borrow to keep the dividend, governments are not thinking twice in printing/underwriting debt that’s a quarter of their economy. Change that used to take decades is happening in months. Management gurus are finding it difficult to even speak, let alone spout a theory to explain the world.

Millennials with nothing to lose are punting it all out, be it the options on fractional shares, bold startups, radical approaches to finance and life. Taking calculated risks has become a necessity to survive. Work was the means of earning and identity. Today wealth building is the means to freedom. While 90s took a few decades to build a unicorn, it takes a few years today.

For many generations, this is the new normal . Playing safe has become the ‘unsafe’. Risk taking will very soon be Business as Usual and not knowing it can put your life in danger.

Buying a Crowd Sourced ‘Truth’

 As more buying decisions are determined by ratings/reviews/stars, marketing is now about buying the opinion of the crowd. But how?

In the early years of mobile, getting customers was easy and building product was difficult. Today its much easier to build products with global sourcing and cloud. Its much difficult to get customers who rely more on their peers than the marketers. A reference call was a long drawn tedious process earlier but is now visible to all through stars, ratings, verified reviews and likes. Can you really buy/manufacture it?

Its no longer uncommon for firms to offer products/services free for a 5 star rating on app store or on market platforms. Today products offer cash back if you put a review post purchase with a 5 star rating. More likes on youtube video means it appears early in search results, more views and the network effect.

Have you considered these in your marketing strategy for this context?

1. Who are the biggest online influencers for your market segment? What is your plan for them to help your marketing agenda?
2. How genuine are your user ratifications in digital world?
3. Is your product /digital marketing plan ensuring that EVERY happy customer is leaving a digital thumbs-up ? How to encourage that behavior?
4. Are you capturing every action of the stakeholder across the ecosystem? Can you make the right offer at the right time triggered by Data?
5. How much of your cross-sell is determined by Data and not just a gut?
6. How well is customer engagement tracked/nurtured/tech enabled/enhanced/measured ? How much of customer insight is built into the Product design?
7. Subject to customer privacy laws, how well do you know where your customer is online? Are you there as well?
8. Have you considered Product led growth strategy to optimize your marketing spend?
9. Are you nurturing your next generation of customers who are digital natives?
10. How much of your product design incorporates this agenda?

As print/television/magazines/print newspaper/physical events are fading, marketing is changing significantly.

It is more determined by the crowd than the seller. As any cop will tell you, managing a crowd is anything but simple.

Growth through Innovation

 When pharma companies look to create new molecules, tesla makes electric trucks, people create unconventional products and prototypes, the process is fraught with risk. Why bother?

Just in the last 10 years, new business categories got created ( Smart phones, Electric vehicles, App stores, Social Networks…) making trillion dollar companies in the process. None of these firms started these products with valuations in mind. All they had was passion and perseverance.

I remember when I bought my first iphone (3), I was ridiculed that the phone was useful only for playing games and not for any ‘serious’ work ( which was done ‘very well' by Blackberry). Social networks were time wasters, Video calls were a fad and app stores were ignored.

Looking back, its difficult to imagine the ridicule each of those product leaders went through , trying to justify them to the spreadsheet based analysts and decision makers!

Firms such as 3M had policies to get a certain % of their revenue from new products EVERY year. In one stroke, it addresses growth, de-risking and obsolescence. While 3M may be an exception, this thinking and behavior does not come naturally to many. Most would like to follow the herd, copy the competition, stick to the routine and wait for orders. Last decade has proved that ‘least risky’ approach to be the ‘most risky’.

Given the surplus capital in the world today, what are needed are those bright ideas that can potentially change ( even a small part of the ) world. With the benefit of learnings of the past decade, there is enough of a rule book to ensure the idea pursuit is done right.

The millennials are enterprising enough to try new ideas , fail, dust up and try harder or smarter. The multiple cases of maniacal customer obsession to build a great product resulting in growth are testament to Product led growth strategies. ( Zerodha, Amazon, Zoho,Zappos…). These have turned the traditional approach of market study/business plan on their head.

Next decade belongs to those brave enough to build great products ignoring the naysayers.