Jerks and saints

Bulk of the world economies are now dominated by services. Manufacturing is perennially moving to cheaper countries and agriculture is getting automated.

Services are people intensive. You better be good with people first if you want to do well in services. The deliverables are intangible, methods of selecting and evaluating a services partner are fuzzy at best.

Its not enough to be an expert. Don't be a jerk. Most people choose their services partner based on their comfort and then justify that with rationality.

Relationships, working in cross cultural, virtual teams, handling conflicts, team wins are more critical than individual brilliance. 

Many a time, it is a popularity contest rather than a talent show!!!

Simple is beautiful

In the world of business agility, where speed overrides everything else given the short career spans of executives, shorter gaps between epic shocks etc, what's increasingly becoming critical is ' simplicity'.

Simpler solutions are easy to understand, implement, course correct, cheaper, less likely to fail( less complexity), less likely to be misunderstood....

Keep the solutions, projects, ideas simple. 

Anything else and you have already lost the plot, in the world of business agility.

Crisps

Why are crisps the most favorite snack on the world for all ages?

Taste, convenience, compactness, easy to handle.....

Crisps are the most favorite in the business world as well. Not the food item. With shorter attention spans, shorter performance windows ( quarter or less), shorter product cycles, shorter customer loyalties etc, all stakeholders in business are now able to absorb things in bite sizes only. 

All the digital channels and media demand things to be simpler, shorter and quicker.

Can your messages, business ideas, project plans, decision support communication get as crisp as those  you eat?

Anything more complex takes longer to implement, harder to measure, costlier to resource and more likely to fail.

No wonder crisps are world favorites!!!

Questioning the question?

A wise person once said ' if I stop asking you questions, it means I have given up on you!'

Some of the best discoveries, inventions, ideas and improvements have come from  starting with the right questions. Many of us are not comfortable in being questioned. We see it as questioning our competency, judgement and credentials. 

Because it's unpleasant to ask tough questions, if everybody remains nice and polite to each other, soon the customers will ask those tough questions. In some time, customers also will stop asking those. Because they give up!!!

Sense 'less' senses!

While we cannot function without full use of the senses ( see, hear, touch, taste and feel), they have a limit.

When you are thinking of a new business idea, new way of doing things, new project or new anything, let the power of thought and abstraction be not limited by your senses! They operate at a much lower level of creativity and flexibility and would only constrain.

Ground breaking ideas may not have come through a simple process while the output may be simple. Senses are based on the laws of evidence while the ideas are not. Not every hypothesis is a fact to start with. But that should not limit you from creating such hypotheses. They may not appeal initially to the evidentiary  world. 

Put simply, don't do the mistake of justifying to conventional senses when you are ideating. 

They should come much  much later!!!

Creator and the player

While there are number of reasons for an entrepreneur to go public, off late there are many who want to go back to private. Why?

Suddenly you are compared to your peers ( worst form of criticism!!!), crucified by analysts and investors who do not have as good understanding of the business as you do, your competitors determine what you do next quarter and the next and suddenly the vision and passion are overtaken by spreadsheets!

As they say, the 'suits' take over and mediocrity , short term thinking, playing to satisfy outsiders set in. Pursuit of ' good enough' is now the norm compared to the 'pursuit of excellence and best in class'. 

End game : A new leader and a new vision OR risk becoming a ' me-too'!

Vaporware

As services start dominating economies globally, one wonders whether human activity is creating more 'vaporware' than anything real and useful! 

High speed algorithmic trading now accounts for half the trading volumes in American stock exchanges. Some of the world's most valuable companies are those that help people share frivolous videos and pictures, those that search and find information that exists already, those that allow people to communicate in very few characters the latest gossip going around!

Once in a while, you hear of technologies that help extract gas from rocks and reduce fossil fuel consumption. But mostly it's sharing cat videos and celebrity bling.

As golf's popularity wanes, the innovation there is to kick foot balls into large holes!!! Is that real progress? Where has all the ingenuity gone? Have the minds become numb from watching silly videos and inane tweets?